Questions to Ask Yourself
What do you want to gain from the experience?
In my mind, there are two sliders that move somewhat independently - one is how serious you are about maximizing your musical outcomes and one is how serious you are about maximizing outcomes in your OF. If the values are percentages, it’s really hard to be at 100% seriousness for both and any increase in seriousness in one makes increasing/maintaining seriousness in the other more difficult, but not impossible. It’s understandably difficult to gauge these levels of seriousness before you’re actually living the life of a DDMOF student, know how much you enjoy/despise the tasks associated with studying each field, and have to make tradeoffs based on your many commitments (more on tradeoffs in the next question).
Since most students considering pursuing a DDMOF are likely academically serious and have had some sleep-deprived homework-filled nights, maybe this hypothetical scenario is relatable and therefore helpful to frame levels of seriousness: it’s midnight, you’re mildly tired, and you have an important project for a class in your OF due at noon tomorrow and a lesson with your teacher at 10:30am tomorrow. You estimate that you have 6 more hours of work to finish the project. You also know that you’ve only practiced once for 2 hours this week. With an expectation of the 6 hours of work meaning that you’d at most get 4 hours of sleep before your 10:30am lesson, which facet of life would you cut a corner on first? Rush the project and possibly get a worse grade? Skip practicing, hack through your lesson, and apologize to your teacher? Get only 2 hours of sleep? Some combination of the above? I’m not sure if I’ve experienced this exact situation, but it at least feels like (a la Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) “story truth.”
Personally (and this is the result of much difficult introspection, attempted objectivity, and subsequently, “feelingsball”), I was probably at about 70% for music and 90% for engineering.
If your pursuit of either music or your OF is just for the credential of the degree, then you have to be really clear about the implications of that mindset. In music, just skating by and doing the bare minimum to get the degree doesn’t offer too many substantive benefits if you’re already also pursuing a degree in an OF. Sure, you do go from “almost certainly unable to cold email a high school music teacher offering to teach sectionals/lessons” to “maybe they’ll see your college degree in music and consider it a little more,” but the results of doing the bare minimum to graduate from music school look thoroughly unimpressive to most people who know what to look for. On the other hand, if your study of your OF is just for the piece of paper, that degree could still hold some value (depending on what the OF is and how recognized your school is within that OF).
If you have strong convictions about substantively achieving in both music and your OF, the next question is for you…