In high school I was really into music. I was in my high school’s wind ensemble and marching band. I was the lone percussionist in the pit orchestra for our production of the musical Annie. On the weekends I would drum competitively with Green Thunder Percussion (the above picture is Green Thunder warming up for the 2012 WGI World Championships).

Something that always amazed me about performing music with a group was the incredibly small margin of error necessary to play well. If several drummers are playing a 16th note double-stroke roll at 120bpm (not a very technically challenging thing for most high school-age players), that is a note every 0.0625 seconds. Every note must be perfectly placed otherwise the whole sound will be dirty or muddled.

In order to train for such precision, each practice session must be under the strict guidance of a metronome. It is only after completely mastering a part individually that one can expect to play perfectly in-time with several others.

Aside from making me a better musician, practicing and performing music extensively in high school taught me many life lessons.

Above all, being a musician imparted on me an unmatched attention to detail.

The low margin of error necessary to play music well in a group is similar to the low margin of error inherent in other activities. This summer I worked in a lab at a biotech startup. With many of the experiments I was doing, variables had to be precisely controlled and even slight variations would skew the results.

Fields such as research, finance, and medicine require a high attention to detail. The amount of permissible error in a stock trade or a surgical procedure is minuscule. Personally, I feel that being a musician was formative in building a detail-oriented mindset which will hopefully aid me at succeeding in whichever job I may find myself in.