Church Choir Choir Application Letter: Fill & Download for Free

For undergraduate admissions: I don't have much inside information on this, but my impression is that college admissions officers do not have strong views on what kind of extracurriculars are legitimate and what kind are not. Many of them have probably not heard of Quora and may be unable to evaluate what it means to have received 30K upvotes on Quora (or whatever). But then again, they also have no real way to evaluate the quality of your high school debate club or the church choir group you led or whatever other thing you have participated in. If they really do get curious, they can probably get a much better and more accurate idea of what your Quora activity means than what it means for you to have led a church choir group.There are three key factors that matter:The student's ability to demonstrate passion and skill at the extracurricular activity in his or her personal statement is very important.If the student can point to external objective metrics that can be used to corroborate his/her skill level, that can be an asset. However, admissions officers may not have sufficient subject matter knowledge to know what metrics are objective.If the student can get one of more recommendation letter writer to vouch for the student's passion and skill at the extracurricular activity, that would be helpful.If you're participating in extracurricular activities where you have reached a relatively high level of skill or achievement, look for experts in the area who can vouch for your skill level. They could be potential writers of recommendation letters for you. Alternatively, they may vouch for your skill to the person (such as your school teacher) who does write your recommendation letter.For graduate school admissions, I don't think extracurriculars matter at all unless they are closely related to the prospective subject of graduate study. If your Quora activity demonstrates your ability to write and think about that subject, I would recommend including it, albeit not making it a focus. If not, I would recommend omitting it.

No point reiterating Jason Li's answer to What is an Australian local experience, especially in IT? but do you really think that work is the same everywhere? It’s not like you are given a computer, a parachute, and tasked to design things in isolation. You have to work with people and understand what they want, as well as be aware of local concepts, regulations, standards of behaviour in the workplace, and the industry (like, that network cables are not made in Australia).Say, you are designing an application billing a customer’s credit card. If you have never used a credit card before, you’d stumble at a basic stage. A lame answer would be, “yes but the specs document must describe it all”. No it must not, no one in their right mind will put general knowledge into a specs document.(Not just a hypothetical, BTW: I saw offshore outsourcing companies making basic faux pas like treating a CVV like a password.)And I am not even touching the language skills, or things like putting relevant information into one’s resume (e.g. skills instead of photos and references to participation in a church choir - again, not a hypothetical). I can also tell you that anyone looking to hire is swamped with completely irrelevant nonsense from overseas from people who just spray their emails in all directions.Are there “generic” IT jobs not requiring local knowledge? Sure, but as such most of them have been long outsourced offshore.I am getting positively sick and tired of people screaming discrimination or, worse, drawing the race card where it is not relevant at all. I also had to go through the same filter, and at no point it seemed illogical or excessive.Do your homework. People from all over the world come to Australia to work and live, not all of them are Nordic Aryan super-geniuses.A tip. “Requirements” in a job ad are not always essentials. If there are not enough candidates, they will compromise. “Local experience” is, in most cases, one of these requirements they will compromise on. Cover letter is your friend, because it is a personal message on top of the generic CV. You have to convince them though that you are not clueless. Don’t write, “I have white skin, I swear by my mom’s health”, write, “My background includes experience nearly identical to this position. My relevant skills are X, Y, Z. I am very enthusiastic about working in this field again”.It is always hard at the first stages when you’re starting from scratch, but if you focus on figuring out how things work instead of being a victim, you’ll fare much better.

I don’t know that one is categorically better than the other, but they do have distinct applications. Fixed is the old-guard European standard, while movable is more often seen in the United States especially, in my experience.For those who may be wondering what we’re talking about: solfège is the “do-re-mi” syllablization system for denoting musical pitch. It’s a common tool in music education almost universally, considered helpful in teaching students to differentiate and organize pitches, and as an aid in learning to sight-read.In addition to this, the syllables of solfège or solmization are still used as the actual workaday nomenclature for the pitch gamut in many Romance languages — French, for example, natively spells “A, B, C” as la, si, ut, while the use of letter names is more of an Anglo-Germanic standard.The French or Italian nomenclature corresponds to what is called the “fixed-do” system of solfège, one in which each syllable has a constant, “fixed” value which corresponds to a specific pitch:mi = always Efa = always Fsol = always Gand so on.In a “movable-do” system, the value of do can be assigned to any pitch — most usually the tonic tone of a given key — and then the values of all the other syllables adjust to fall in line according to the scale. What pitch each syllable will represent is dependent on what key we’re in at the time, essentially, so that each syllable is highly “movable.”If do = C, then re = D, mi = E, fa = F, etc.If do = D, then re = E, mi = F[math]\sharp[/math], fa = G, etc.If do = E, then re = F[math]\sharp[/math], mi = G[math]\sharp[/math], fa = A, etc.Another way to think of this is that fixed do causes the syllables to behave more like pitch names; in movable do they work like scale degree numbers.My feeling is that movable do is broadly more useful in training singers, especially in choral applications. Movable do is all about hearing intervals in a tonal context, and relating them to that context. It will help to develop an ear which is finely attuned to pitch hierarchy and harmonic function in a practical sense.Fixed do is better for developing the student’s fine-grained facility with the entire fully chromatic gamut, free of the sort of context constantly implied by the movable system. Fixed do is all about negotiating linear intervals in ‘absolute’ terms. It is especially useful for atonal music or music which is otherwise not harmonically tethered to common practice convention.Fixed do is a great tool for training a young musician from the ground up. Admittedly I find it all a bit odd, because it’s not how I learned my way around the pitch jungle-gym; I taught myself to sing the pitches straight off the page without recourse to any syllable system, so that adding nonsense syllable identities seems entirely superfluous. That’s just a bias of mine.If you’re trying to improve the ears and eyes of a collegiate or church choir, movable do is going to be more practical and to the point. The same intonation problem which falls between mi and fa in one key, for instance, will be in just that same place in some other key as well, and so will be easily predicted by the singers.