Bottoms up! Say we, the men of the Lamont Jazz Ensemble.
I loved graduate school - but I had a lot of hard knocks. For one thing, I was really broke - and for another, I wasn't as good as I thought (and I didn't think I was that good!). When I auditioned for the symphony, I ended up in second chair, because, as the brass instructor put it, "you have a really crude approach to the instrument".

Crude? Me? A logger/firefighter from a dinky little town in the middle of nowhere, a veteran of a hippie bar band, crude?

Yes, crude indeed was I. I had never been around good players, so I had never developed a sophisticated sound or much true musicianship. I began practicing 4-5 hours a day, then playing 4 hours of ensemble rehearsal in the afternoon. You get really good, really fast, strangely enough :-)

It was a great experience, and all of a sudden I was getting loads of gigs! Pretty good paying ones, too!

Not only gigs, but studio sessions, I was writing arrangements, etc. Things were going very well indeed.When I graduate, things got even better! I landed a 6 night a week gig playing in a showroom at the Fairmont Hotel, where I played with artists like George Shearing, Billy Eckstine, Joe Williams, etc. every night! During the day I would go hiking/mountaineering in the Rockies, learned a little rockclimbing, or played studio sessions. I even wrote music and performed weekly on the Denver entertainment talk show! Life was indeed my oyster.

What I DIDN'T know was that technology was about to enter my life in a big way - and if you're a student reading this, take heed! Whatever is working today may not work tomorrow...