10 Reasons You Should Consider Going to Audio Engineering School
In today’s day – an age of the internet and digital experiences – there is something to be said about the value of human interaction. There is nothing like hands on experience at a real audio engineering school, sharing time with people who have the same passion and desire to learn new skills.
There is no denying you can Google or search YouTube for anything you want to learn – from how to play a guitar, to using Pro tools and more. Even our own CRAS Audio YouTube channel has a good amount of information on these topics. However, students who have become experts in the audio engineering field will say if you can make the investment in school, you should, and that going to an audio engineering school was a very valuable experience. Even freelance recording and mix engineer professionals with their own sites say it was “invaluable experience” to go to audio engineering schools.
If you want to become a sound engineer and are considering music colleges, we’ve created this list to help you through the process of vetting the Best Audio Engineering Schools. Here are the top ten reasons graduates say going to CRAS, our audio engineering school was the best decision they ever made.
Top Ten Reasons to Go to Audio Engineering Colleges:
- Hands On Experience
- Discipline
- Networking
- Earning a diploma / industry certifications
- Proven Case Studies
- Reverse Engineering
- To say you have
- Affiliations
- Job Assistance
- Diversification
Let us break down these reasons a bit more for you to fully understand the value of going into an audio engineering program in a school atmosphere in person.
Hands on Experience
Getting hands on experience in a school environment is priceless. We have a variety of top of the line equipment, and teachers who know the ins and outs of all the gear and are there to guide you through it. If you have any questions as you learn about sound engineering, we provide support customized to your experience with our school. Having a standardized set of gear allows us to create a comprehensive curriculum that brings students from the basics, through troubleshooting to a true understanding of the equipment, not just memorization of pressing buttons.
Discipline
Going to a physical school helps you build discipline within the field of study, whether it’s music engineering, live sound, physics or any field of study, and also gives you great life skills. You will learn how to meet deadlines, interact with a variety of people from different backgrounds, work within certain time frames, start and finish projects from beginning to end, learn the importance of being on time, and learn how to follow directions. Being surrounded by like-minded people will improve your habits and develop the discipline and drive to make you successful!
Networking
At school you will build relationships. You will build relationships with your peers, teachers, and staff. Also, we have numerous experts from various parts of the audio industry that visit our school, and you never know how one relationship built when you are learning at school can turn into an opportunity later in life. One of our students and on-campus AES presidents Ike S. was chosen to ask a round of questions to huge industry icon Manny Marroquin, and through that opportunity he built a lifelong career relationship before he even finished the CRAS program! But even more than that, the relationships you build with your classmates can last a lifetime, and every student graduating CRAS goes on to build their own career. You never know who might give you a call and offer you a job as a thank you for helping them through school.
Earning a diploma / industry certifications
There is something to be said of people that earn a degree or a certificate of completion from any program. Going to school and going back to the “discipline” reason earning a degree gives you something you can always fall back on and earns you more respect with career opportunities. The opportunity to earn other industry certifications not only teaches you another set of skills, but it helps expand your technical prowess, adds to your resume, builds confidence and proves that you are much more qualified to accomplish a task than someone who taught themselves how to use the same software with a couple 5 minute YouTube videos.
Proven Case Studies
Schools can provide testimonials and graduate stories to show you career paths and how students that actually learned from the same programs achieved their career goals using the knowledge and hands on experience they gained from school. Even if you tried to learn a program like Pro Tools online via a YouTube video, you still wouldn’t learn how that is applied in the real world. By being exposed to the entire CRAS program, you may even be turned on to different career paths than what you originally may have though you were interested in. Maybe you didn’t realize how cool game audio would have been until you sat through a few classes on it!
Reverse Engineering
The best way to learn anything is to reverse engineer it from top to bottom. The most successful audio engineers have learned their craft through experiences, both in class and on the job. If you skip the step of going to a sound engineering school, you could be missing out on a lot of information that can help you be the best in the business. Our classes focus on true understanding of WHY you press buttons, not just the memorization of what buttons to press. Understanding the “why’s” of engineering is one of the most important aspects that is truly hard to convey without having practical, real world demonstrations that you will find in our labs and lecture classes.
To Say That You Have
Funny enough, it’s really hard for anyone to speak about something if they never experienced it themselves. You can earn respect from many industry employers and individuals in the industry by having a formal education in audio engineering. Many people wish they would have been able to go to school, because it would have saved them countless lessons in trial and error. Going to school is a truly life changing experience as well, not just the education that you earn, but changing your lifestyle, your habits and practices, meeting new people, exploring new areas. There is really no replacement for the experience of going to a school.
Affiliations
Going to an accredited school like ours, where we have a number of successful graduates that are now with big brands and well respected music artists and companies, let’s you draft that affiliation from our audio engineering school. This can work both ways – you can use our affiliations to help further your career by association, and you can help represent us in a good light by going out and achieving your dreams. This is a symbiotic relationship – making you successful is what makes us successful.
We also have affiliations with companies that are hiring, which leads us into our next reason you should consider going to school to learn music engineering – job assistance.
Job Assistance
When attending a school or college like ours for a specific trade, we have many people on staff that can help you with an audio engineering internship or job placement after you complete our program. With the internship program we offer, each student gets real world job experience working in the audio industry. This allows you to continue practicing your skills that you learned in classes in a real job environment, and continue to build your skills and relationships.
These kinds of valuable connections aren’t going to be available to you if you are teaching yourself audio engineering on the web!
Diversification
When you go to a music engineering school like ours we provide a full array of audio engineering applications, from becoming a recording engineer, to game audio design, live sound, movies and more. We go into how audio engineering effects and improves concerts, live radio, sound effects, airports and more! Many people don’t know how many different fields audio engineering can be applied to. Maybe you had no idea that your audio reconstruction skills could be used by a forensics team to solve a murder mystery! High end car companies also hire audio engineers to tune the engine sounds of their cars, and well as the internal acoustics and stereo systems to provide the best driving experience to car owners. By going through the CRAS program, you will be involved in every aspect of audio engineering, even ones that maybe you had no idea about!
