Student Profile

Mark Landon Mark Landon earned his Bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1981. A quarter of a century years later, he started attending a distance program to change careers, proving it never is too late to start over.

Mark Landon earned his Bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1981. A quarter of a century years later, he started attending a distance program to change careers, proving it never is too late to start over.

Content: I received a BA in Journalism from Pennsylvania State University in 1981. In the past 25 years, while I have not worked as a professional journalist, my education has served me well. I have enjoyed a prosperous career, largely built on the business end of the media. I've sold advertising and/or managed ad sales people for magazines, yellow pages, newspapers, specialty publications and online services.

For the past 11 years, I have enjoyed starting, growing, operating, and recently, selling a successful web-based business. Throughout this time, the demands of the business along with the realities of life: outside activities, family, children's activities and a busy social life, have left little time for thinking of returning to school. So much to do, so little time!

But as I knew right along, deep down inside if there is the proper motivation, there is always a little more to give. My inspiration came from my teenaged daughter. At 12-years-old, this shy and insecure girl spent a week at a summer day camp advertised to teach kids about rock-and-roll. At the end of the week, the shy kid took the stage and captivated the audience of about 100 parents and friends with her voice. In this moment, my daughter decided that she would become a professional performer.

In the past four years, her passion and her talent have grown. She has worked extremely hard and she has stayed focused on her dream. She writes music, takes voice and guitar lessons, also plays the piano, and studies music theory. She practices a lot and performs wherever and whenever she can. She is equally comfortable doing a set in an intimate coffee house as singing the national anthem in from of 19,000 fans in an arena.

As a parent, I had an instinct early on to discourage this career choice. There are so many who dream of successful performing careers, and relatively few survive the competition. Of course, logic would want me to encourage her towards a 'practical' career. But I did not discourage her. I decided that while there are a million obstacles that might wind up getting in her way, I would not be the one to squash her dreams. I decided instead to provide whatever support I reasonably could to help her.

So I looked at a situation where there are maybe millions of young performers with passion, talent, ambition, and a willingness to work hard. What is the difference between the many who will abandon their dreams and go on to do other things, and the few who will succeed? My belief is that proper career guidance and business management are the keys.

Now my story comes back to my education. I have made the time to enroll in a distance-learning program with the Berklee College of Music in Boston. It is a certificate program in the music business. I am learning about how the record industry works. I'm learning about the successes and the failures of others. I'm learning about the massive changes that are taking place in the industry as the result of the Internet. I am learning about how to run a successful 'musician business.'

Going back to school has been challenging. It has been a lot of work. It's made me steal hours from other activities, change my habits, read and write more than I have been used to, and generally flex some of my mental muscles that had been inactive for quite some time.

Hopefully, I'll have the opportunity to layer my little bit of newly gained knowledge and my business experience on top of my girl's abundance of talent, ambition, and enthusiasm. And hopefully, this will give her the edge that will help lift her above the crowd. In any case, I have learned about an exciting industry and I have learned a lot about myself.




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