Bob Kramer Studio

Felix Jobst, a 27-year-old Music Business/ Management major from Hamburg, Germany, spent his spring semester not only far from home but also far from the Berklee campus. He was in New York City, working in sales and marketing at the Verve Music Group, learning what it takes to bring his favorite music to market.

"I'm a big jazz head," says Jobst, "and New York is the mecca."

Nearing the end of his Berklee education, Jobst wanted a chance to immerse himself in his chosen field. "What I was really looking for was a hands-on approach to learning the music business," he says. "You cannot get the whole music industry into a room."

What Music Business/Management Department Chair Donald Gorder got him was an internship at a record company that includes one of the most storied labels in jazz: Impulse! So Jobst earned course credits as he worked on a college-marketing database, tracked sales for an internal top-25 list, and merged the catalogs of the Verve, GRP, and Impulse! collections into what he notes is now "the largest jazz label in the world"—a result of the merger of Universal and Polygram in the Seagram Company entertainment empire. "We'd been studying that merger in the classroom," says Jobst.

Living through a music-industry merger is just one way an internship can bring the reality of a career in music to life for Berklee students. "It's on-the-job training," says Gorder. "It's an opportunity to see firsthand what goes on behind the walls of some enterprise, whether it's record labels, merchandising, publishing, artist management and agents, concert promotion and production, or nonprofit arts organizations. Students come out of internships with much-elevated confidence about their ability to work in this industry. They say, 'It's all that much more real to me.'"

And the students are not the only ones who benefit. "The company absolutely gets something out of it," says Jon Vanhala, national director of sales for Verve and Jobst's internship supervisor. Vanhala is not alone in that assessment.

"It's something we do both selfishly and to give something back," says Nancy Knutsen, vice president of film and television repertory for ASCAP in Los Angeles, and internship supervisor. "We're a membership organization, and we haven't always been able to hire the additional staff that we need" to help artists protect their publishing rights and to mount industry-wide celebrations. Interns help out, she says, making contact with a wide variety of people in the music industry along the way—an education in itself. "While we broaden their experience, we also rein in their expectations," she says.

Across higher education, internships have long been a way for students to earn college credits while they get a taste of the real world. Businesses sometimes advertise internship opportunities on college campuses, hoping to get some free help in exchange for exposing students to life on the inside of an industry they're hoping to work in. Often it's a student's first glimpse of their imagined career path. But at Berklee, there has been a seriousness to music-industry internships right from the start.

Take the Film Scoring Department's long-standing summer internship at Segue Music. In the 1980s, Daniel Carlin, chair and chief executive of the largest postproduction facility in Los Angeles specializing in music editing and supervision, came to recognize Berklee as an important source of musical and technical talent. "We had hired several people to train as music editors," says Carlin. "The best had gone to Berklee."

Carlin approached Film Scoring Department Chair Donald Wilkins and in 1989 established an all-expenses-paid summer internship in music editing for a pair of advanced Berklee students. The interns are selected competitively, based on a tape and an interview, and are flown out to the West Coast and put up for the summer by the company. Carlin's firm also set up an endowed scholarship fund in the name of the late film composer Georges Delerue, to cover tuition for the students' internship course credits. After their summer at Segue, students return for at least one more semester at Berklee.

"The idea is for them to sop up what's going on in the industry and come back and share that," says Wilkins.

"It was the chance of a lifetime, something you don't pass up," says former intern Paul Rowan '95, who now works at Michael Whalen Music Limited. What Rowan learned at Segue, he says, was "the practical, everyday things. It was hearing the stories, how they deal with directors and composers. It's all in theory in the classroom. There, it's real life."

"As much as you can learn in the classroom, when it comes to becoming a film composer, it's about apprenticeship," says Michael Whalen, whose recent work includes a new theme for Good Morning America. Whalen supervises Berklee interns in his Needham, Massachusetts, studios because "I like the idea of having young people around," he says. "They listen to things in a much fresher way. A lot of the kids have given me feedback on my own work."

Bob Kramer Studio

In expanding its internship offerings over the past decade, Berklee has tried to make the most of new opportunities in the music industry as well as Berklee's unique approach to music education. "I noted a convergence," says Executive Vice President Gary Burton. "I saw an industry trend toward welcoming interns in the recording studios, recording company offices, management offices, and publishing companies. And Berklee's students are the most real-world-trained music students in the business. So it seemed like a good idea for us to promote our students' availability."

To do just that, Berklee opened the Office of Experiential Learning this fall. A new internship coordinator will maintain a central database of internship opportunities and help department chairs, who still make the placement decisions, develop and maintain relationships with potential internship sites. The coordinator will also help standardize requirements and student assessments across the departments that offer internships.

The challenge for Berklee, says Professional Music Department Chair Kenneth Brass, is not just standardizing internships but also providing a range of opportunities for learning by doing. "We've kind of had blinders on," says Brass, a long-time booster of experiential learning. "We could only think in terms of internships, but there's service learning and mentoring. And not just in music education, but in general education, too."

In Berklee's more technical fields, on-the-job experiences have proved readily available and especially valuable. Though just a handful of students in the Music Technology Division take internships for credit each term, some 40 to 50 Music Synthesis and Music Production and Engineering majors take on less formal internships at recording studios and other facilities.

"People who return from those internships are tempered by experience," says Music Production and Engineering Chair William Scheniman. "That exposure, that proximity to the professional process, is great." Back in the classroom, the insights gained in internships can be shared with other students. "They hear it from us," says Scheniman, "but hearing it from a fellow student is different."

Often, what interns learn are not technical skills but people skills, like customer service. "The recording industry is thought of as a technology-based industry, and we have great equipment here," says Bonnie Milner, general manager of Long View Farm Studios in North Brookfield. Milner makes sure her Berklee interns understand that "we put 90 percent of our energy into providing a creative environment."

Today, interning has become an integral part of several Berklee programs, especially the Music Business/Management Department, which requires hands-on experience—either a one-semester internship or a two-semester practicum working at Heavy Rotation Records, the student-run record label—as a condition of graduation. The department was established in 1992 and began sending out interns in the summer of 1994.

"We don't allow internships for credit until students are fairly far along," says Music Business/Management Department Chair Donald Gorder. "We want them to be able to put their best foot forward and be a good reflection on the program."

Now, an average of 50 Music Business/Management majors a year go through an internship for a minimum of 140 hours over at least eight weeks. Students sometimes line up internships themselves, but the department has placed students in 200 sites over the past five years. Occasionally, usually in summer placements, internship sponsors give students a small stipend. But usually, the internships are unpaid. And while some internships take students to New York or Los Angeles, most are local, where they can be fit into a Berklee course schedule.

"I came to Berklee for music production and engineering, but after my first music business class, I knew that's what I wanted to do," says Amy Bellas, 22, from Lisbon, Maine. "I really like marketing." She certainly got her fill of sales and marketing at her internship last spring at Rykodisc—she wasn't just stuffing envelopes.

"They don't let you get the coffee," says

Bellas. "And sales interns weren't allowed to mail anything out. They wanted us on the phones."

Gorder makes an effort to ensure that internships don't just mean unpaid labor for companies or a chance for students to slack off. "We know they'll be doing a certain amount of grunt work, but we expect they'll also be let into how this business works—be allowed into meetings, sit in on conversations, and ask questions," says Gorder. "It's rare that I hear from a student that they're not being treated well."

For their part, students are required to keep a journal—an entry for every day on the job—which they turn in every three weeks, and write an end-of-semester report. Gorder checks in with the supervisor at least once during the internship, and both he and the supervisor evaluate the student, resulting in a grade for the course.

But it's the rough-and-tumble of the music business that makes for the best learning experiences. "We wear so many hats in this office," says Trip Young, product management coordinator for Virgin Records in Los Angeles. "We're doing administrative work one day and Lenny Kravitz's backstage stuff the next. Interns become involved with the same things. They become a part of the administrative chaos. And I'm not afraid to throw people in the fire if they show that they're capable and responsible."

Showing that they can function in—and contribute to—the business environment is important for students who are about to launch careers. "Ideally," says Gorder, "an internship gives the student an opportunity to shine."

Sometimes it leads right into a job. "These are the people who I know can do the job," says Bill Stafford, director of copyright for BMG Entertainment in New York, who recently hired former intern Jennifer Link '99 for a new position.

Panos Panay '94, one of the Music Business/ Management Department's first interns, was placed at the Ted Kurland artist-management agency, which counts Berklee's Gary Burton among its clients. "I did the filing and everything, the usual intern stuff," says Panay. But a trip to Europe, including his native Cypress, that Panay was organizing for a group of Berklee students caught his boss's attention. That fall, Kurland hired Panay as a booking assistant. Now Panay is a vice president, in charge of the firm's international division, and himself a sponsor of Berklee interns.

An internship provides a "nice launching pad" for a student's music-industry career, Panay says. "It's the only thing on their resumé that spells out hands-on knowledge. It's not just theoretical."