Picking a major is the common dilemma of the high school senior. What if it isn’t interesting? What if the classes are boring? What if it is the worst experience ever, and you want to switch? For multiple seniors in the class of 2015, picking a major wasn’t an issue – they’re doing what they love.

“I started producing because of my friend Harry Gottesman, from Highland Park. He had been putting stuff up on SoundCloud that he was producing – mostly hip-hop – and I really dug it. He gave me a copy of one of the demo versions of Ableton and I started to play with it a little bit,” said Leo Berliant, who will study Recording Arts at Indiana University next fall.

After being exposed to the art sophomore year, Berliant studied Ableton Live, a premier computer program for recording, composing, arranging, mixing and mastering music.

“My first summer using Ableton, I took classes at this place downtown called Music Industry Workshop, where these guys that are certified to teach Ableton gave me lessons, worked with me on some of my tracks and helped me master them,” said Berliant. Having played guitar since kindergarten, electronically producing music felt different and provided a new rush.

“When I finished my first track, I remember I sampled an artist from the 40s, I think her name was Millie Jackson. I flipped the sample from one of her songs and just made an old school, simple hip-hop beat. But I was so excited by it and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It felt so good to finish a track, more so than it had in the past when I had finished songs on guitar,” said Berliant. After years of strumming a guitar, playing in bands and performing in Green Day cover shows, Berliant found his own niche in audio engineering.

“The trick for me is that a lot of these styles I don’t really listen to much, so sometimes I say to a student, ‘To my ears that sounds a little bit weird, how does it fit into the genre?’ And sometimes they say it totally fits the genre so I say okay go forward,” said Dr. Dan Brame, director of the school band as well as Berliant’s music theory teacher. Much like Brame’s inexperience with programs like Ableton Live, colleges follow suit.

“It’s a relatively new and quickly changing field, so there are very few schools that have these programs. I narrowed it down to 4 or 5 of the strongest ones, but it was impossible to turn down Jacobs (School of Music),” Berliant said. One of the more selective music conservatories in the United States, the Indiana University School of Music, or Jacobs School of Music, accepts roughly two hundred freshman per year. They fit into a total school population of one thousand six hundred, half of whom are undergraduates. Berliant was one of around three hundred that applied to the music production program. First, he got accepted through general admissions, at which point they sent his application to be reviewed by the music school. Then Jacobs’ admissions reached out to him and asked for a portfolio.

“It’s interesting because it’s a lot like visual artists. They have to decide, ‘This is my very best work,’ because they’re using these three, four, five things to show them,” said Brame. Berliant decided on his best work, and waited…and waited…and waited.

“From the portfolios, they extended interview requests to sixty applicants, and from those sixty they accepted about twenty to twenty-five,” Berliant said. Berliant was one of the twenty to twenty-five accepted out of three hundred applicants.

“My parents have still been relatively supportive, because I’ve been a musician my whole life. Plus, I know I’m going to have an advantage because of the Jacobs School of Music. It’s reputability means that I will have connections in the field. That being said, it’s still a very unstable industry, and that’s something that I have to prepare for.” Berliant said. Also prepared for the unstable music industry is Marty Muzik, who will be studying Music Performance at Elmhurst College next fall.

“I kind of always knew that music is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I have always been fascinated at all of the emotions that music brings out of most people. When I played in a rock band and had a drum solo, people came up to me with big smiles on their faces and it just made me feel great that people enjoyed it so much. That is what really inspired me to stick with music and get better,” Muzik said. After searching for a small school with great music and jazz programs, he found Elmhurst to be the perfect combination of opportunity and proximity.

“Elmhurst has really good experiences in Jazz. They have a lot of people who are some of the top Jazz musicians in Chicago teach there. So it’s a real personalized kind of situation,” Brame said. In addition to Berliant and Muzik, many other seniors are pursuing music-related majors in college. They include: Dean Scopelliti, who will study Music Education at Illinois Wesleyan; Eleanore Fellerhoff, who will study Voice Performance at the New York University Steinhardt School of Music and Performing Arts; Matthew Berzon, who will study Music Theatre at New York University; Bailey Knowles, who will study Music Education at Illinois Wesleyan; T.J. Thompson, who will study Jazz Studies at Elmhurst College.

“I just want to do what I love and keep excelling at what I do best,” Muzik said.