i think juilliard is the hardest school to get into. harder than harvard, and probably harder than just about anywhere else. i know that harvard has a lower acceptance rate and i don’t care. consider the difference between writing a college application essay and auditioning for a conservatory. you can spend months on an essay. you can rewrite an entire paragraph at three in the morning, decide you hate it, and change it again the next afternoon. somebody can read it over for you. tutors!!!! you can see what you've written and tweak it to perfection before anybody else has to judge it!

you can practice for a juilliard audition for YEARS, and then you have to perform in front of people who have probably heard your repertoire played by some of the best musicians alive. there are prescreening recordings and other admissions requirements, of course, but for a musician the live audition is an enormous part of the decision. and there is so much that can go wrong in the room which has absolutely nothing to do with how good you are! imagine you're playing piano, and halfway through a passage you get a cramp in your leg. perhaps the lighting is weird and you can't quite see what you need to. somebody coughs at exactly the wrong moment, and for a second your concentration goes somewhere else. the bow hairs on your violin start to come apart…

i also think the comparison with harvard (and other ivy leagues in general) becomes notable when you consider how much privilege affects conventional college admissions. an applicant from a wealthy family may have attended an expensive private school and had years of academic tutoring, and extracurricular achievements generally come from money. a student who has the means to spend an entire summer doing something impressive for their application is in a drastically different position from somebody who has to work. research by raj chetty and his colleagues found that applicants from the wealthiest families enjoyed substantial advantages in admissions to ivy-plus universities, even when compared with applicants who had similar test scores.

but i suppose someone could argue that wealth matters in music too. private lessons are expensive, and a child whose family can afford an instrument and regular instruction has an enormous advantage over one who can't. juilliard, obviously, isn’t some magical institution where money stops mattering. but even after all that preparation, the applicant has to perform! whatever advantages brought you into that room, you're still the one sitting at the piano when somebody asks you to begin! no revisions, no do-overs.. your best on the spot!

i find that people tend to dismiss arts as something less intellectually serious than an academic discipline. classical musicians have to understand extraordinarily complicated compositions, but there are also matters of actually physically performing them. i don't think people always appreciate how much work goes into developing that kind of control.

sometimes i think about how often i revise my own writing, sometimes changing a sentence over and over because the wording isn't quite right……. a musician can have all those opinions about a passage of music, but when it's time to audition, they have to make the decisions while they're playing. and if something goes wrong, they have to keep going! i can't imagine spending so much of my life preparing for something and then having to walk out of the room knowing there wasn't a single thing i could change about what everybody had just heard. go arts, and go juilliard.. as a stem person, i could never do what you do!