Hello everyone! My name is Landry and I’m a senior BA music major with concentrations in management studies, gender & sexuality studies, and race & ethnic studies. I play oboe in a few chamber ensembles as well as the baroque recorder in Collegium Musicum, the early music ensemble on campus. I’m originally from Oak Creek, WI which is just south of the city of Milwaukee.
I am the oldest out of the three of my siblings (and yes, I fit right in with the stereotype of an oldest sibling). Some of my favorite things to do include knitting (I taught myself during quarantine!), trying new recipes, and working at the HideAway downtown!
I came to St. Olaf with the idea of going into the field of arts administration, thinking it was the perfect combination of my interests in management, the arts, and anything I could do with music that didn’t involve the invocation of my debilitating performance anxiety. However, with the onset of the pandemic, I have become more interested with the role the arts and culture play in their communities and within greater societal systems and plan to pursue law school in the coming years after graduating this spring in the hopes of working as a legal consultant for nonprofit and social justice organizations.
I also felt an increasing need to be directly involved with my community in my future career, which has led me to accept a position with Americorps in St. Paul during my gap year at College Possible, a non-profit organization devoted to supporting first-generation students and underrepresented populations through obtaining a degree at a four-year university.
In this course, I am excited to be able to speak with stakeholders in an arts community I have no experience with. I have traveled outside of the midwest (I have never even been on a plane) and therefore have little experience with cultures and communities outside of the one I grew up in, which is pretty similar to that of Northfield.
While as exciting as that is, I’d say I’m equally nervous about it. It can take a lot of courage and risk to put yourself out there in a space you’re not familiar with, whether you are physically there or not. And while we won’t physically be in these spaces, learning online comes with its own set of challenges.
After my first year at St. Olaf, I worked in Northfield as a Research and Administrative Intern for the Vintage Band Festival (VBF). VBF puts on a four-day festival every four years and a one-day festival in the years between during the summer (and is run by a former St. Olaf professor of music)! While interning at the festival, I learned a lot about the role that the arts play in the tight-knit community of Northfield. I was able to speak with local business owners and government bodies while planning for the festival and truly got a sense of how important festivals and other events such as VBF are for the infrastructure of a community.
I have quite a bit of experience doing non-academic writing, as I am a Staff Writer for the Marketing and Communications Department here at St. Olaf, but am still working to find a “voice” while doing blog-style writing. I also have experience blogging in a class taught by Prof. Epstein in a previous course, and have grown to be extremely average in understanding the ins and outs of WordPress (so if you have any really, really, beginner questions, there’s at least 50% chance I can answer it).