h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You've missed out the most dangerous, terrifying and cunning of all students - the student politician. Known to rally small-to-submedium sized groups around irrelevant issues of principle (often concerning the primary industry of a small village near the Nile Delta), under extreme circumstances (e.g. bureaucratic threats to student income) can become very dangerous and motivate large mobs of up to a thousand previously unknown students into protest.

These protests most commonly involve sitting down somewhere and drinking, and is always preferred to attending lectures.

One category of students, THE MUSIC STUDENT, can actually be divided into many categories.

I will keep it simple and use only a few, however.

UNDERGRADUATE MUSIC STUDENTS (which I have observed quite frequently being one myself) follow some basic stereotypes. There is the hardcore musician, quite often a brass player, who comes in with what he believes to be superior talent. He practices more than an adequate number of hours a day. Eventually he either discovers he is not as good as he thought or he goes on to live a life in penury playing for community orchestras and teaching pathetic students. There is born to be a band director who could care less about the actual music. He just knows how much fun it was to be drum major in high school. This type will either fail school or, tragically, achieve his goal and become an overbearing high-tempered Bernstein wanna-be who could care less how many parallel fifths appear in Stamp's Fanfare. There is the composition/theory major. Like the art student, they are often rather eccentric to different degrees. As they learn more about their trade they become desperate with the knowledge that so much good music has been written in the past and their professors want them to write something that would be considered intellectual.

The good music students will not partake of the intoxicating liquors as often. They find that so much of their time is absorbed by the music. Much preparation, an unimaginable amount of practice, is required to pull of some of the simplest of professional level ventures. A friend of mine has been working on a Rachmaninof piano concerto all summer. (See, they do not even get a vacation!) He is now worried that his teacher will, when he returns to school, tell him, "Good, now start this Chopin concerto."

The more avid drinkers to be discovered around a school of music will be the slackers and the non-majors. Non-majors will hang around the music school for some reason. Perhaps because they like the marching band. Perhaps, music majors have a lower standard for friendship. Maybe this mystery will unveil its secrets in another posting.