“Juilliard? That’s amazing! So…what are your plans after graduation?”

Great question. The truth is, I don’t know yet. But I really love the harp. Is that a good enough answer for you?

So go many conversations since graduating from The Juilliard School this year with my undergraduate degree in harp performance, where I studied with Nancy Allen. I never dreamed I’d be here. Like many harpists, I started on the piano and later switched over to the harp. I didn’t know I would fall in love with harp and go to college majoring in it. I never imagined I would have the opportunity to go to Juilliard and study with an amazing teacher—Ms. Allen. But here I am, a girl from Jersey whose current reality exceeds my wildest dreams thanks to supportive teachers, friends, and family.

…I’ve seen that a harpist’s skill set is diverse and lends itself to many other jobs besides playing the instrument.

So if I’m following the script, my next steps after a performance degree from Juilliard involve auditions, practicing, performing, teaching—all the experiences necessary to build a professional harp career. Except I am going off script.

While interning at Sony Music Entertainment’s classical label Masterworks last year, I had the chance to help my managers restructure and optimize classical playlists. With the rise of mood-based playlists, I came to realize that people not only loved listening to Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, but also to crossover tracks such as The Piano Guys’ cover of “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran. If you asked me about my favorite artists, I’d probably say John Mayer, Beyoncé, Coldplay, and Lauv, just to name a few. I’ve always loved all genres of music and found myself listening to more non-classical than classical music. As a harpist studying classical music at a conservatory, I wondered if listening to more non-classical music than classical was a problem.

My search for a musical identity reached a turning point for me when Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in music. He was the first non-classical and non-jazz artist to win the prize. I saw his win as a shift in the musical landscape. With Lamar winning a prestigious award that has historically been given only to two older musical genres, it felt like the world of music that I was so familiar with—classical and jazz—had been tainted. Suddenly, the boundaries that used to confine classical music were expanded to welcome hip-hop, even heralding it as greater than the works of the long-revered classical and jazz genres. This led me to reexamine what drew me to music in the first place—was it the people, the teachers, the instruments, the repertoire, or did I just love music?

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to take business classes at Columbia University and explore internships in other fields through Juilliard’s exchange program. I spent a semester at CBS Sports as the network prepared to broadcast the Super Bowl and a semester at RCA Records when Childish Gambino won four Grammys for his song “This Is America.” More than anything else, these experiences helped me realize how easy it is to get caught up in my own life as a classical musician, forgetting about the sheer number of people tuning into the Super Bowl or the Grammys every year and the impact these events have on our culture. I decided I wanted to be a part of the larger world of music and entertainment, but I could contribute in a different way than my performance degree might dictate. Living in NYC the past four years, I’ve seen that a harpist’s skill set is diverse and lends itself to many other jobs besides playing the instrument.

So what are my plans after graduation? I recently started working at Sony Music Entertainment with the Arista Records marketing team in New York City. I’m starting to understand that success and happiness come in many different forms, and you might find your place somewhere far off the beaten path. For me, that meant finding a way to contribute to the mainstream music entertainment field. For you, that could mean being the principal harpist of an orchestra, working in entertainment law, becoming a music consultant, going to medical school, or any multitude of things. I have in no way made it, and I still don’t know exactly where I’ll go from here. But for now, I’m a music lover who has found a path that lights my fire by burning the script. •