Music Industry Co-op Seminar

Northeastern University

Semesters taught: Fall 2017

Course description

This seminar is designed specifically for graduate students in the Masters of Science in Music Industry Leadership program who are working on co-op. The course content and activities will help you reflect on the ways in which you are learning, the attitudes and behaviors that influence how you approach professional challenges, the motivators that influence your decision-making, and how this experience relates to your overall career goals. In many ways, the job music industry market depends not only on your ability to do your job well but also on understanding how your job intersects with the responsibilities of other music industry professionals and artists, both those with whom you work directly (e.g., at your own firm) as well as those whose work only tangentially impacts your daily/weekly responsibilities.

Your overall objective is to gain a deeper and broader understanding of your role’s importance within the music industry. By doing so, you will begin to see interactions and intersections with other professional areas, your academic work (both in the MS.MIL and your undergraduate programs), and your prior background and professional work experience (even if it is not in the music industry). In one sense, the co-op seminar is about professionalization; in another, however, it enables you to connect the experiential and traditional components of your Northeastern education.

The course is organized not into areas of content mastery but rather as a series of assignments through which you will meet these broader objectives. These assignments, due at the end of every other week throughout the semester, include an orientation and evaluation with your supervisor, guided reflections, and updated job search materials (resume, portfolio of work samples).