Meet Megan, Part 2: Why I Love Music Therapy

This month, I wanted to share with you what brought me to music therapy and a little bit of why I love it.

Since I can remember I have loved music. Just ask my family, when I was younger I sang my conversations to my parents, and spent a whole car ride with my grandparents singing the same song over and over. I played piano and was in band and youth orchestra. So when that time came to answer “What do you want to do with your life?” senior year, music just seemed like the right choice. I knew I did not want to be a teacher in school. Performance was an option, and I considered it, but that didn’t feel right either. Majoring in psychology was an option, because I had loved every psych class I had taken in high school. But again, it just didn’t seem like the right fit. I happened upon music therapy quite by accident. One Wednesday morning, while standing in my oboe teachers living room before my lesson, she asked, “Have you heard of music therapy?” She gave me paper with some research that she had done and a few schools that offered the major. The rest, you could say, was history. I researched it online, and it sounded like a perfect fit!

All I knew about music therapy when walking into college was what my mom, oboe teacher, and I could find online. That first year I learned a lot more about what exactly it was, and some ways to use it. Although I did a lot of reading about it Freshman year, I first realized that I loved it Sophomore year in my first real clinical placement. One of my placements was in a classroom at a school for children with a variety of disabilities. I had observed this group with some of my other classmates freshman year, and already loved the clients. One in particular has stuck with me. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, and was no longer able to be in a regular classroom. But she did not let that hold her back. I’m not saying that the music therapy she got from three Sophomores in their first real clinical placement changed her life, but it did have some effect, and we could all see it. She changed and grew in the few weeks that we saw and worked with her, and the joy we saw in music therapy was the icing on the cake. I still think of her to this day, and hope the three of us had as much impact on her as she had on me.

I love working with children and adults alike. My summer job throughout college was working at a day program for adults with developmental disabilities. This gave me a different perspective, as I worked with mostly children in my clinical placements in college. I don’t know if I can pick a favorite demographic that I have worked with, as I really enjoy them all. But I will admit that I enjoy working with speech difficulties and disorders a lot. It is one of my favorite things to plan interventions for. Maybe it’s playing a drum, which can help to prime the language centers of the brain and organize speech, so it comes out more fluidly and at a normal speech rate. Or playing kazoos and other wind instruments to help increase breath support and lung capacity, making it possible to speak for longer without taking a breath. Or maybe singing familiar songs to help with initiating and articulating words or phrases in context. These are some of my personal favorite interventions to plan and implement.

Other jobs and experiences, both in music therapy and in life, have helped me to realize that I choose the right job… or maybe that the right job chose me. I sometimes wonder what I would be doing if my oboe teacher had not asked if I had heard of music therapy and encouraged me to try it out. You could almost say music therapy found me, instead of me finding it.