I’m in the military, but want to pursue Audio Engineering when I’m out.

Hmmm.

A couple background questions:

Does your pops support you in any way or does he have job contacts that would majorly benefit you and if he does would he cease to support you if you pursue something else?

Are your contacts actually solid? Not just reply to your Facebook messages solid but would they bat for you over someone else they have been seeing regularly and if so, why? Are they like 2am friends? Can you answer that soundly?

I don’t think it sounds cheesy as hell to posit that life is short, I nearly died at 24 and everything since has been gravy on top. I live my life like it could end anytime and it caused consternation for some people sometimes (parents in law). But what I mean is I get it and your hypothesis checks out.

You have no kids and spouse, so that checkbox is covered. Do yourself a favor and if you’re serious, you should keep it that way until you have full momentum in your career if you’re serious about career in this. Straight up it’s inadvisable to try and compete in music it sound at that level and start with obligations to others.

I would also ask: is there anything unhealthy you left in civvie life that military life did good by you there could be restarted in the music scene? If you already had any drinking or drug issues before I would actually solidly advise you to look deep into yourself and consider doing sound as a hobby and going to school elsewhere.

Admittedly, my gut instinct is to advise against it and suggest your old man is right. You would be trying to get into an industry that has been sliced into pieces due to covid and has a backlog of people just trying to get their old jobs back. It’s always a bad time to get into the music industry and to do it right now is probably ten times worse timing than normal. You would be sacrificing a GI Bill and thousands of dollars for a skillset being rapidly obsoleted by better .vsts, algorythmically adaptive microphones, equipment getting cheaper with every generation; by the time you finish school you’ll be years behind your competition in everything from contacts to age to experience. It is an industry that is interfered with by world events we currently have so there’s not even short term stability in the best of cards.

Biggest argument if tldr and you read nothing else read this My biggest argument is honestly that while transitioning you have life on easy mode. You file for VA disability during TAP. Fucking just listen to me and do it even if you’re sick of paperwork and military or that will fuck you for years. Fucking fill out your VA disability paperwork during TAP(whatever the acronym is for transition assistance) not after. Anyways then you apply for unemployment and you will automatically get it.

This is the most crucial time of your transition, what you do right here because I guarangoddamntee you if you stumble here civilians will look at your resume, won’t give a half shit that you’re a veteran, and will assume you’re a dumb lug head who knows how to basically pull a trigger and you will be discriminated against forever afterwards if you stumble here.

I would suggest two and only two options:

You get a good job from one of the employers looking for employees in a technical career job with full benefits (think employers like corpo Boeing, Ford, Google, whatever random stuff turns up on those sites your TAPs people know more, people that went this route I have seen hVe generally good and stable lives.

DON’T take shit work, especially with some narrative of “oh well I don’t want to be on unemployment too long and draw benefits that could go somewhere else while I work some odd job to make ends meet; this will destroy you and consume your career. Everyone I have seen do this winds yo working shit jobs they hate, wishing they could go back, and winding up with shit worse than before they joined.

That’s why I would advise you to consider something else, or do sound on the side while you do a career job for even two years or college for four. Because if you fail while trying, you won’t get back up again for a long time if you go this route and college will be your only way out but if you used your GI bill on an expedited sound eng program that will be gone and you will be really stuck.

If you can do some sort of minor in sound eng and a major in something that transfers easily that would be my recommendation honestly. To go to school for something that isn’t sound choosing a school that has a ton of resources for sound and leveraging that.

I think I sorta flip flopped but I would say my biggest consideration changed from “what would I do” to “how statistically did my peers wind up and what factors influenced that,” and overwhelmingly I started to see red flags that my peers missed and are currently condemned to reap the rewards of.

But also like you said life’s too short and I’m hardly a person to always advise safe plays and conservative lifestyle. i wrote a lot since writing this inbetween

For background: I moved out of my parents in Kansas at 15, joined the Navy at 18 when I couldn’t get FAFSA funding because I was an unaccompanied minor and the superintendent wouldn’t sign my paperwork, refused a nuke contract I was offered due to my ACT and Asvab score (I could see twenty years deep into my life when they offered me that and I didn’t want to be in the Navy for twenty years), I got out and smoked too much pot (wasn’t in a good head space post military, took me two years to get sorted) while working in a cafe south of Seattle and started learning a little bit about the music industry there, then got bored and took a spin to Hawaii before returning to Kansas where I met my wife after which we moved to Poland.

I haven’t gone to school yet because there was always something causing me to think I wouldn’t be a pal e long enough. I’m now based out of Wroclaw, Poland, so I was right, but I have to hustle to get my schooling done before my 9/11 expires and I’m aiming for Paris where my wife and I are trying to relocate atm.

I flip flopped a lot and I wish you luck. I would say I want to see you go for it but also I know how precarious your situation is from watching so many lemmings go over this cliff and I don’t want to be responsible for encouraging to blindly run over a cliff I have seen eat my comrades.

/r/audioengineering Thread Parent