I am incredibly thankful to go to a university that encourages students to pursue the majors that they really care about, and that provides programs that offer the rigor I am looking for as well as the flexibility for double majors. Ask any music major at any school and they will be happy to tell you how time consuming it can get. Between the classes and the hours spent practicing and in rehearsals, it starts to add up. Not only that but the busiest time of the semester for concerts and recitals usually happens to fall right on top of the weeks leading to finals. Talk about a stressful end of the semester.

One thing my parents told me when I left for school was "if the workload of the music major ever becomes so much that your music seems more like a chore than your passion, then it is time to take a step back and see what needs to be shifted around. Try to never lose your love of music."

This is something that I really took to heart. Music was always my release from everything school related, but now it is half of the work that I am doing in school. So far so good, but I always try to keep myself in check.

It would be very easy to add practicing as simply another homework assignment I had to do, but if I dismiss it as just a homework assignment will I start to lose the passion and emotion that is so involved in the music? But on the flip side if I only practiced when I was feeling like putting in the amount of passion and emotion that the piece deserved, how often would I practice? I had a director that used to always say "If we only rehearsed when everyone was feeling 100%, we would never rehearse at all." I think there is a lot of truth in this because it is very difficult to find the balance between the discipline of making sure you practice and stylistically adding the emotion into the piece.

Some days it takes a lot of effort. Digging deep inside to remember why you love what you are doing even though you are headed to a masterclass to play through your recital music for the fifth time in one day (my day yesterday).

I think this applies to anything you are doing at this point in the semester. You have to remember the long term. Remember why you are doing what you are doing. Remember why you are studying what you are studying. What were the goals that you had in place for yourself? Take a step back to see how much closer you are to those goals than where you were at the beginning of the semester. You've come so far. Remember that as you finish preparing for your concert/recital/exam/paper. Remember and take some time to feel that sense of accomplishment.