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Of course, there are the many academic reasons. It motivates people to try harder in school because doing well at an instrument provides them with a sense of pride and confidence. Music directly involves math skills along with reasoning and English skills, as well as building responsibility and leadership in every child who participates. It is the only subject that involves both hemispheres of the brain, which govern logic and creativity. In turn, this promotes kids that tend to think outside the box because they link standard routines with new and creative ways of completing them. Music helps people grow and learn to trust others. Playing in an ensemble requires you to let go and rely on the other people around you and trust that everything will be as it should be.

Music education is important to us because it is the only thing that is omnipresent in almost everyone's life somehow. It is one of the most powerful forces in the universe and it motivates people and gives them something to believe in. When you get knocked down, sometimes you feel like you don't have the strength to get back up. Music provides that strength.

Our video almost didn't happen. I noticed the scholarship contest around the beginning of April, and I thought to myself, 'Well, that's pretty cool.' At the time, I had no intention of doing it. As I thought about it more, I realized that was something I truly believed in fighting for and I HAD to do it. But I knew I couldn't do it alone, so I asked for the help of Alex Parrillo, one of my best friends. We worked endlessly on this project whether it be writing new lyrics, coming up with ideas for the video, recording the song, or editing the video. So many hours were put into this, and it's hard to believe it all goes by in just four minutes and eighteen seconds.

We were originally going to film the band playing in the auditorium of our school, but ironically, we were kicked out of the school by the head janitor. After this happened, we all looked at each other with the same thought: "THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT FOR THE MUSIC VIDEO!" But alas, we didn't get it on film. We considered doing it in the parking lot of the school as a good analogy of the 'music not being in the school' but ended up filming it in my yard instead. The only thing I didn't like about it was that silly shed in the background!

We really did have a fun time doing this and even from doing this, we have bonded and become a tighter group of friends. It's a real life example of what music does for people.

I think the biggest challenge for us was finishing by the deadline. We started around April 1, about a month late, because we didn't even know this contest existed. We had three crazy weeks and long hours spent recording the music in my house, editing all the vocals, making the master track, and finally moving on to video. The entire filming process took all of four days. We had to go very quickly and plan along the way and I think that was the hardest thing. Sometimes, it's hard to keep the faith on projects like this because when something goes wrong, it's frustrating. But this was one of those things where we always just had more work to do in order to finish, so we never really had the time to complain and lose hope even if we wanted to. I suppose that was a good thing in the end.