As part of a new weekly Journal column, Nathaniel Dunaway meets with Western Oregon University students to discuss their lives and their experiences in the world of higher education. In doing so, he hopes to find an answer to the question what does it mean to be a college student in the 21st century?

This week, Music Composition major Kit Mills discusses his decision to return to school, and the challenges he faces as a husband and father.

As Kit and I began our conversation, a student in the study area near us began playing Chopin on the piano. His music provided a particularly apt ambiance to Kit’s musings on the power of classical music.

A conversation with Kit Mills

The decision to go back to school had to do with wanting to expand my opportunities, but also wanting to take the first step towards jumping through the hoops of becoming a college professor. I’m not settled on that, but it’s certainly something I’ve done before and like doing. I worked as an adjunct professor at community college in Washington. I wasn’t sure if getting a doctorate was the route I wanted to go, but I thought I would at least try a masters, and let that be kind of a litmus test for whether or not I wanted to go on to doctoral work. Jury’s still out on this.

Two years ago, I thought I was headed to the Berklee College of Music graduate studio performance program at their new campus in Valencia, Spain, after a successful audition as a drummer. However, they offered no financial aid and I have a strong aversion to debt. So after Berklee didn’t pan out, I started thinking more about working on the compositional side. I love sharing classical music with people; it’s such a huge world of music and there are a lot of points where classical music has influenced a lot of things we take for granted in our own popular culture. There’s so much beauty that’s been the product of so many minds over the centuries. I’m one of those people who loves nature. I love great views of the ocean. I grew up in the Puget Sound area, on Whidbey Island. My enjoyment is doubled by sharing beautiful things with others, and having them enjoy it too. I’m interested in doing that with music. Anybody who says there’s nothing in classical music that they can like clearly hasn’t started to tap into it. It’s like someone who just eats McDonalds all the time and says “nah, there’s nothing else good out there.”

My parents have both had a long-standing engagement with music. I grew up with a guitar-playing dad and a piano-playing mom. I have a lot of memories of us singing and harmonizing together. A played a lot of drums throughout middle school and high school, and didn’t really know a whole lot about classical music. When I went to college, at Wheaton College, near Chicago, I had originally planned to be an engineering major, but it didn’t pan out because I found there is a distinct difference between high school physics and college calculus-based physics. So really quickly I found myself fishing around for what to do. Long story short though, I got into some music theory classes, and felt initially, as a lot of people do coming into classical stuff for the first time, pretty intimidated. There’d be kids in my class who’d been studying the violin since the age of three. So I was intimidated until we came to the point where we used our ears to listen and transcribe, to tell what was going on in a piece of music, and it was there that I realized that all that childhood stuff that I’d done, all the singing with my family, all the music-making around the house, had given me a really good ear. I ended up majoring in composition. I suppose most people who tackle composition have at least a little bit of a dream of being the next Beethoven. Maybe I did to begin with. But no matter what, we should try to be good stewards of the minds we have. We should be working towards a real mastery of whatever it is we’re interested in.

One reason I’m interested in classical music is because so much of it has withstood the test of time. It’s clear that there are elements of Bach’s music that somehow still speak to people. Sooner or later every artist has to grapple with the things that we all wonder about; life and death, love, friendship, matters of faith, matters of upheaval. So much of the music we now blithely take for granted was often produced in times of great turmoil. Beethoven was working on one of his symphonies with cotton stuffed in his ears while Vienna was bombed by the French. Mozart wrote a lot of music while he was broke and ill. Somehow these guys have found a way to put things down that have just lasted.

I have a wife and a young son, and it’s almost as if I have two different lives. I have one life where I engage as a student, and I have another life where I set that all aside and I come home as a parent and spouse. The big trick is prioritizing. I’ve been so determined to do this without taking any loans, without going into any debt, and we — my wife and I — have practiced living frugally, as musicians, so that’s good. But the challenge is now to be frugal with my time. I definitely find I have a very good excuse for not having free time.

What I would council any student who’s serious about learning is to first recognize that learning isn’t just something that happens in the hallowed halls of academia. Learning is a life-long vocation. It’s something that continually engenders curiosity over the years. You don’t have to be a music major to love music, or a literature major to love literature, you don’t have to be a sports science major to be interested in the workings of the human body. I suggest one learns to recognize that there are great assets here at a university, where you have the chance to really grow as a person. Some of that is through book-learning and some of that’s through life-learning.

I hope students take time to just be still. Put down your cell phone or tablet, stop, and smell the roses (when they’re in bloom), and admire the autumn leaves. Most days this fall, if you’ve watched me walking homeward, you’ve likely seen me with a leaf in hand to take home to show my wife and son. An important component of being a student is to learn to be a student of the world around you, and to learn to enjoy it.