October 2010 Student and Intern Support

Again, thanks to all who participated in last month’s project!  I am really pleased with the number of entries.

Ok, so here we go!  The project for October is to create an audio public service announcement geared toward potential music therapy students.  The PSA should address the following:

• The awesomeness of the field of music therapy
• What coursework a student can expect in a music therapy degree program
• What happens after completion of the degree, i.e. internship
• Where a music therapist can expect to work following internship
• What board certification entails
• A brief list of resources where an interested person can find more information.  Please include MusicTherapySource.com! 🙂
• A shout out to the American Music Therapy Association Students, our sponsor for this month!

The PSA should “sell” the field of music therapy to the potential student.  The biggest challenge here is that the recording must be no longer than 60 seconds. Brevity and effect use of language will be key!  For an example, check out the PSA created by Kimberly Stanard on AMTA’s website (look for this at the bottom of the left column.)

These submissions will be published on Music Therapy Source, and will be judged by a panel consisting of music therapy students and professionals.

Background music is a great addition for a PSA, but if you do this, please be sure to use original music.  Copyright law gets hairy, and I won’t be able to publish PSAs that utilize music to which they do not own the rights or have permission to use.  Let me know if you have questions regarding this.

This is your opportunity to be super creative!  If you have a Mac, it is likely that you have the free program Garageband, which you can use for this recording.  If you are on a PC, check out Audacity, a free recording software that works really well for projects like this.  There are a number of tutorials for these programs on YouTube.  Have fun with it!

A big thank you to this month’s sponsor, AMTAS!

These projects are due Friday, November 5th.  Please submit these in MP3 format to musictherapysrc at gmail dot com.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Good luck!  -Matt

Music Therapy students and interns are eligible to participate in this program and compete for an award of $100 US.  Most importantly, by participating, you are sharing knowledge and ideas with the music therapy community at large, as well as helping to advocate for the field.  This is the primary purpose of this program, and we are lucky enough to be able to provide a little financial support along the way, thanks to our awesome sponsors.