I'm Not a Professional, Am I?

The quandary of so many music students. We market ourselves as musicians, but when do we get to stop calling ourselves student musicians and start calling ourselves professionals? When do we draw the line between what we do being just for fun and being forever?

The connotation of a professional comes with the promise of higher pay, although it also carries the added responsibility of becoming an adult and being entirely responsible for ourselves. It means that we have to grow up and stop playing around at what we do. Since playing around is what most of us do best, that can be a frightening thought. It's also strange to think that we are doing the work many of us will continue to do for the rest of our careers. The constant rehearsals and performances, putting life on hold until music is the only life we can possibly remember, only knowing musicians. Someday this will be our lives. For some of us it won't, but for most of us it will. If we are living the life of a professional for the most part, what does that make us? The teenage stage of becoming a professional musician?

We are no longer entirely students. When we get to be part of a cast, part of a show, part of an orchestra, we aren't just students. When people pay to come and see us play that makes us more than the students that we used to be. When we can get called to come and play gigs, we are professionals. As hard as that can be to think of, it's true. We are still students because we are still learning, but we are also professionals because we teach. We will be students for the rest of our lives because we will continue to learn from what we do and we will also always be teachers as we teach those around us, deliberately and unintentionally.

It is not a fancy degree that makes us a professional. If we wait for that degree to be handed to us, we will never be able to take ourselves seriously. We won't have the belief in ourselves that we are really ready to be considered professional, to compete on a global level. The belief in ourselves comes from ourselves and not from the opinions of others. We are professionals because that is what we are meant to be. We just need to learn to lay claim to that in ourselves and for ourselves.