Samuel Schoenwald Email & Phone Number

In a recent conversation, a friend of the family referred to me as “a bit of a risk-taker.” This surprised me, as I’ve always thought of myself as someone who deliberates over every decision. But when I recalled the context, I realized the comment related to my willingness to put myself in unfamiliar (and sometimes uncomfortable) situations. For me, adventure and learning are core to my happiness and personal growth: I learn and develop fastest when challenged and surrounded by the unknown.As a classically-trained musician, I’ve been thrown into the new and unpredictable countless times -- performing an unfamiliar musical genre or collaborating with musicians I just met. For five months, I uprooted myself to live and perform on a cruise ship. The members of my ensemble came from three different countries and vastly different backgrounds, which made our trips to port cities incredibly interesting. I also loved striking out on my own to explore and experience as much of the culture as possible. My current foray into the unknown has me learning software development. I have always found the tech world compelling and have been working diligently to educate myself. I've taken courses in computer science fundamentals, object-oriented programming with Java, algorithms and data structures, and, most recently, full stack software development. The frontends of my recent projects have been made with React, using either Javascript or Typescript. The backends use Node.js, MongoDB, and either a REST or GraphQL api to serve data to the frontend.Several music colleagues and friends of mine have successfully moved into tech careers. This doesn’t surprise me, as highly-trained musicians have a number of skills that transfer over well. Musicians break a musical challenge into small, fundamental pieces while also considering its place in the larger context of the music. And because music performance is almost always a collaborative process, we become skilled at working things out together. Our colleagues could be strangers or old friends, in a large orchestra or a small ensemble. Either way, we must work efficiently and tactfully from the beginning, with some gigs only allowing a few days (or even hours) to prepare. We are disciplined, diligent, and uniquely suited to learn new, abstract systems -- from the notation of the musical language, to the understanding of musical structure. This has a lot to do with my love of programming: problem-solving on a whole new level.