
plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living right now.”
– Alan Watts
Hi there! Welcome to the Berklee Alumni Column. My name is Joely Cromack-Kluko, and I am a proud 2024 Berklee graduate. Since that long-awaited day in May, I along with 1,352 students were sent off with four years of music education, bachelor’s degree in hand. At Berklee I connected with like-minded creatives (both students and professors) while majoring in vocal performance with a minor in English creative writing.
Berklee is an artist’s networking dream. At its core the college is a multifaceted institution for the performer, business personnel, producer, writer, composer, therapist, and— more often than not— a collaboration of those fields. Despite my success at Berklee, I am writing this article as an admission of the universal postgraduate question: What now?
Like post-graduate life, that question is open-ended and can spark anxiety regarding the future. A comfort that I wish to share with all past and future graduates is that you are not alone in fearing the unknown. I found that my fellow graduate friends and classmates are plagued with the same worry about what’s to come. This worry is not exclusive to any major, aspiring field, home state/country, or level of success. It is a worry that adapts no matter how many career opportunities one has lined up, or not.
This collective uncertainty has inspired me to create a space where recent Berklee Alumni life is viewed from a present lens. The “Alumni Column” will provide an opportunity for graduates to showcase their work, reflect on their experience at Berklee, discuss their plans for the future, but most importantly, appreciate the process. Berklee is diverse in terms of its student body and the studies it offers. The Alumni Column will reflect that and shed light on individual journeys and their distinctiveness post-Berklee.
It’s easy to compare your progress to someone else’s and become discouraged. I hope this column will allow insight into the uniqueness of the Berklee graduates’ paths and achievements. As an example, I am an aspiring poet and English Professor, but I would not trade my Berklee education for any other. Berklee was my ideal place to explore different genres of writing. As I apply for graduate programs in literature, I am writing for Berklee’s global arts magazine, FUSION. While I begin that journey, I will continue with music. In August of 2024, I wrote and released my first single “Lying to Me”, an electric pop-punk song that I debuted in a live performance at Berklee’s Colvin Hall in April of 2024.
As a student, I wish there was a place to see that progress is non-linear and relative, and will happen differently for everyone. I needed a place for advice and real examples of successes and struggles from someone like myself. In the form of a conversation between one recent graduate and another, “The Alumni Column” will aim to be the place that turns “What now?” into “Now this. . .”
Alexander Braun, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons