Activity 7: Audio engineer on her career journey

- My name is Kelly Kramarik, I am 25 years old, and I'm a freelance audio engineer. Some people just stay in one trade, one part of audio. I like to do a little bit of everything, so I work in a studio as a recording and mixing engineer. I work in live sound as a monitor and front-of-house engineer. In film, I'm a production sound mixer, so my main goal is to get the dialogue on set. Then, in post-production, that's when we focus on sound effects, creating them, taking them from a library, fully recording that, footsteps, basically re-creating the world that we already recorded in a studio setting so we have more control over it. So, I went to school for business and I was a vocal minor. I had to take an elective for my vocal classes and it was called Music Technology, and it was all about, you know, microphones and speakers, and music, and I was like, "What?", like, "This is something I can do?" I just, I don't know why my whole life, in music, I had no idea that audio engineering was a thing. Once I took that Music Technology class, I changed my major to multidisciplinary studies, which is when three minors make up your major. We didn't have a music tech major program, so that's how I kinda finagled it, and then I studied theater and advertising. So, the theater side of things, I did theater sound design, which audio engineering in theater is huge, so that's a whole nother avenue that you can study. And then, advertising because I knew I was probably gonna have to be a freelance person, and so, I wanted to be able to market myself. I graduated from West Virginia with my bachelor of science and multidisciplinary studies three years ago, and then I immediately moved out to Denver. I didn't have a job lined up. I knew there were studios in Denver. I contacted a bunch of them and no one wanted anything to do with me, so for about two years out here, for the first year, I did nothing but bartend. So, I was a bartender all through college and I was bartending out here as well, and then I found the master's program, and I was like, "You know what? "If no one wants to hire me right now, "maybe I need to hone in some more skills." And so, I decided to apply for graduate school. You don't need to go to school, but it definitely gives you a leg up on the competition, depending on their experience, obviously, so once I started interning, I was interning at this studio in this past summer. And the way that I got that was just networking, those engineer meetup groups where I go to every studio, I always talk to the owners. We had a meetup at this studio and I came to it, and I was talking to my boss and he said to call him. And so, I called him and I sent him my resume, and he hired me as an intern. So, I interned here for a while over the summer, and then at the end of the summer, he hired me on as a freelance audio engineer. Randomly, I got a call from a producer in L.A., I got a call from a producer in New York, all asking me if I can do production audio for their gigs, and I was like, "Yeah, like, "that's awesome," and I'm wondering how they got my name, and I find out it's just from one connection where I did a good job, and so, they give my name out to people. One other way, I guess, that I've been getting jobs is, production houses in Denver don't have audio people on staff, and I noticed that when I was researching different production houses on their websites, they didn't have audio people. So, I just started sending them emails with my rates, "If you ever need an audio person, let me know," and I've gotten a couple of calls from people that way, as well. So, just being super proactive and saying yes to everything is how I've gotten where I am right now.