Monday, January 13, 2014

Planning for Second Semester

Now that I'm finally almost half way through my senior year of high school, I can confirm that time does, in fact, move slower in school. It seems like it's taken much longer than 3 1/2 years, but I'm here. The best parts of these last few years have definitely happened outside of school. Rundown Radio continually grew more successful, and my job as a martial arts instructor was becoming more stable and efficient. Overall, I can definitely see how I have matured over time. I do recall many stressful and strenuous hours spent over homework and projects for classes, but the time in between makes for some good memories. This year, I am very grateful for the extra time that iQuest has given me. It has allowed me to put a lot more focus on what is now my passion; writing music. This has evolved to improve both the career of Rundown Radio, as well as my own personal career as a musician for media. I even recently learned how to use a program that allows me to directly edit the coding for the music of one of my favorite childhood SNES video games. As far as the future goes, my plans are panning out well. I recently got accepted to my top choice college: Berklee School of Music. I have also applied to UCSC, USC, UCSB, and Cornish, but Berklee is definitely where I intend to ultimately go. However, I am deferring my admittance until fall 2015, to allow myself time to continue to work and gain money close to home while promoting Rundown Radio.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Bucket List


  • Skydiving/BASE jumping
  • Travel the world (at least 4 countries)
  • Attempt a world record
  • swim with dolphins
  • Invent something
  • Bungee Jump
  • Go cliff jumping
  • See the aurora borealis
  • Become multilingual 
  • Write a concept album
  • Go backpacking over multiple days

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Sunday, November 24, 2013

iQuest Update

Recently, things have been kind of hectic with all the college applications due soon. Luckily, many of the colleges to which I am applying for give me opportunities for experience in the process. That's why a lot of my recent free time has been devoted to writing scores for submission to music colleges. The downside is that this, on top of my job and school, leaves me with almost no downtime. So far this year, I have completed the soundtrack for two indie video games. The first is a mobile puzzle game called "Polygone", which can be found here: http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/19861 (note that only one song has been coded into the game so far, as it is still in the mid-early stages of development). The other is a platformer called Pointstar. Images can be found here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/pointstar/images. Almost all of my music has been posted up on my personal soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/joe-marchuk. 

And then there's everything with Rundown Radio. We've been playing all over the place lately, and will be playing this Friday at the annual Danville Tree Lighting. Most excitingly, our new EP, Chasing Signals, will be released soon. It is our greatest recorded work yet, and we're all really excited for it's reception. 

Most importantly, I'm having a great time doing everything--even during the hectic moments. Once college applications/auditions/interviews are all finished, any residual stress should be out of the way.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Holland code and Meyers-Briggs code

Holland Code: ASR
Meyers-Briggs Code: ENTP
                I found both codes to be close to what I scored myself before taking the tests. In fact, the Meyers-Briggs code was exactly what I anticipated. The Holland code seemed to be leaned  more towards career choice, while the Meyers-Briggs code seemed to be leaned more towards personality type. This is interesting, because after reviewing the results of both codes, I found that the Holland code gave more accurate results for career choices, while the Meyers-Briggs code gave me more accurate results regarding my personality.  
                My pre-test estimate for my Holland code was that I would be artistic, social, and investigative, but I after taking the test, my code showed that I was artistic, social, and realistic. To be completely honest, after reviewing the code, and reading about the similarities and differences between the possible codes, I didn’t find a very large or noticeable difference between the two.  Many, if not most of the suggested career choices that were recommended to me were careers that I have considered.  As far as the code descriptions go, it’s not necessarily that they were completely inaccurate, but that they do not seem to be a major part of the Holland codes, and were vaguely described.

                As for the Meyers-Briggs code, my pre-test estimate was that I would be ENTP. After taking the test, the results I got were an exact confirmation. On the results page, not many careers were listed. Those that were listed did not interest me much and were not careers that I had significantly considered before. There was, however, very extensive descriptions and explanations regarding the meaning of the code’s significance in terms of personality. I found that essentially every aspect of the description of ENTPs fit me perfectly.