The Next Sixteen Counts by Steven

The Next Sixteen Counts by Steven - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

Four-hour practices, three times a week. Saturdays from nine to nine. All to prepare for eight performances a season. If you've never been part of a competitive drumline, that schedule probably sounds insane. If you have, you know it's actually kind of normal.

I spent my high school years inside that world, the marching arts scene modeled after DCI and WGI-style competition, where schools and even professional groups spend hundreds of hours perfecting a single show. Practice wasn't just musical rehearsal. It was full show run-throughs, physical conditioning, and learning to march, dance, and play in time, all while carrying a drum heavy enough that some of the freshmen in my section visibly struggled under it by hour three. Everything happened fast, loud, and in front of everyone else.

What actually shaped me wasn't the hours. It was how our instructors treated feedback.

Better musicians in that world are made almost entirely out of correction. You'd get corrected mid-run, sometimes in front of the whole line, sometimes over a mic that every section could hear. What separated people wasn't who made the fewest mistakes. It was who could take a correction, apply it immediately, and move on without it throwing off the next sixteen counts.

That sounds simple until you're the one sweating through hour three of a four-hour rehearsal, and someone tells you your rhythm has been slightly off for the last three run-throughs. The instinct is to shut down. What our instructors actually cared about was whether you could separate the correction from your ego fast enough to still be useful for the rest of practice.

Eventually, I noticed the higher-level players weren't just reacting well to feedback aimed at them. They were listening to feedback given to other people and applying it to themselves before anyone had to say a word to them directly. If the tenor line got corrected on a transition, a snare player paying attention could catch that the same issue applied to their part and fix it before it became their turn to get called out. That's when feedback stopped being something that happened to me and started being something I could get ahead of.

I didn't fully understand how much that had shaped me until I ended up on the other side of it. Now, as a drumline instructor at Santa Clara High School, I run the same kind of rehearsals I used to sit through, giving the same kind of corrections that used to make my stomach drop as a freshman. What used to be thrown at me, I'm now the one throwing.

Being on both sides of it now, I've realized good feedback was never really about the person giving it. It's about whether the person receiving it is ready to catch it, use it, and keep moving without losing the next sixteen counts of their life over it.

I felt that same instinct again in Data Structures and Algorithms, a notoriously hard class. We'd been stuck on a dynamic programming assignment, a water allocation problem, and so many students had questions that the professor pulled someone up to walk through their code with the whole class watching. Not me. But as they worked through it, I noticed the same logic in my own approach: how I'd decided whether a given allocation, a "bucket," was valid. The professor said it wasn't. My code was never pulled up. Nobody corrected me directly. But I'd caught it anyway, the same way I used to catch a tenor correction before it became mine, and I fixed my own solution before I ever turned it in.

I don't think I would have learned that as fast, or as physically, anywhere else. Sitting in a classroom, feedback is quiet and private. On a practice field at 9 a.m. on a Saturday, carrying a drum that's already made your shoulders ache, feedback is loud, immediate, and impossible to ignore. That environment forced me to build the skill instead of just being told it mattered.

I still catch myself using it. Somebody points out a bug in my code, and for half a second I feel that same instinct I used to feel mid-run-through: get defensive, or get better. I learned which one actually moves you forward standing in formation, years before I ever learned it in a classroom.