“Seeing students progress is the biggest joy.”
Kathryn Phillips is a 2020 Calvary alumna who has served as a graduate assistant for the music department, teaching multiple students. “I do private guitar lessons. Right now I have four students, and then I do a group guitar lesson and that has three students in it.” Phillips is also working alongside Brittany Hill in teaching an online praise band class. In the past, the online praise band class had been very similar to the in-person praise band. Phillips explained, “Dr. An asked us if we could do something with the class, and involve the students. So they changed it to separate people teaching it— me and Brittany. We can’t play together online, but everyone gets Pro Tools, a recording software, and records songs together and then mixes them together.”
Alongside being a graduate assistant and pursuing her master’s, Phillips has worked at PT’s (a local coffee shop), managed the Warrior Cafe on campus, and played in a band called Safari. Phillips said that after college she would like to pursue “something in the realm of teaching” but if that doesn’t work out “I have my band in Lawrence— Safari.”
Phillips says that her favorite thing about being a graduate assistant has been “teaching the individual lessons. It’s really fun to see students progress. So I really like teaching intermediate students because there’s so much to learn, and seeing them learn new things and play new things really well.”
Phillips says her advice to undergraduate music students is to “pay attention in classes and do your homework really well, because you’re paying a lot for the classes. I just hear about a lot of students who sleep during this class or whatever and are not really paying attention. Especially for music classes— especially with Dr. An— it can be really engaging, and you can learn a lot. To learn in college, you have to apply yourself because you can go through and get a degree without learning very much. But I think it’s important to actually apply yourself, actually learn, and actually do the work well.”
