Lehigh Choral Union

I was supposed to write this for a Lehigh student blog, but the job never really materialized. I have one more post in the can that I will share. Enjoy!

During the summer after graduating from high school, I was recruited through e-mail to try out for Lehigh Choral Arts. I had been in a school chorus since fourth grade, so this appealed to me as an activity that I should continue once I entered college. I did not know what exactly to expect in the audition for choir, but I thought I could follow the conductor’s lead to get into the University Choir.

Unfortunately, I had a harder time than I did when entering high school singing the scales, as I usually do not like to sing on my own. My audition was short, which I did not consider to be a good thing. As I learned later from choir members, I should have come prepared with a song, similar to an “American Idol” audition. I found out later that night along with everyone else that I would be singing in the Choral Union.

At first, I was disappointed, but this meant that I got to spend the first weekend of school sleeping in my room rather than being away on a retreat with the rest of the choir. I feel like this time was crucial to developing some of my first friendships at Lehigh and experiencing time around campus. Sure, I would have made friends in choir, but it was also important to know other people in my hall and freshman orientation group, along with having the same experience of the days before classes as most other freshmen.

While I thought that I would be disappointed to not be in the “better” choir like I was in high school, it has turned out to be a good time. The Choral Union is made up of a small number of Lehigh students in comparison to residents of the Lehigh Valley. This was not desirable to me as a freshman because I wanted to meet more people around my age. However, I have always been one to relate better and have deeper conversations with my parents’ friends and other older adults. Thanks to a change in policy, Choral Union members and choir alumni were able to travel with the choir on their biannual trip outside of the country, so I was still able to experience and sing in China and Portugal at the end of my freshman and junior years, respectively.