APPLETON, Wis. — So there was this lawyer, who upon passing the bar exam filed a complaint:

“They taught me everything about the law,” he said of his schooling. “But they never taught me how to be a lawyer.”

A common refrain for many students across many areas of study at colleges and universities.

Brian Pertl, dean of the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence University, recognized that need. So he filled it.

He launched the “Entrepreneurial Musician” class 10 years ago, and it took just one trimester to know he was on to something.

Martha McDonnell was in his first class. She was a classical violinist. She also had a passion for the fiddle.

“But she didn’t tell anyone because she didn’t think it was appropriate at the conservatory to tell people,” Pertl said. “She was worried about what other students would think.”

With Pertl’s encouragement, McDonnell came out of her fiddle closet in the “Entrepreneurial Musician” class. She discovered many of her classmates shared her passion, so she started the Fiddle Club, which still exists today.

“By her senior year, she had auditioned for a new musical that Sting was putting out, and he was looking for a classical violinist who could fiddle,” Pertl said of the former front man of The Police.

“And she won the audition as a senior at Lawrence. And instead of walking in graduation, she was in Chicago playing with Sting in his new musical.”

So a class that helped McDonnell share her passion, and put together business and marketing plans to put her skills into practice, enabled her to find her career path.

“I think what we’ve been trying to do, that sort of transcends that, it’s just to make that whole idea of dreaming your career into existence part of a larger culture,” said Pertl. “So it’s not just a class, but it’s like you’re seeing professors doing their thing. And you’re seeing students starting little businesses and careers and creating records while they’re students. So all around you, there’s this activity in a swirl of people doing stuff and putting stuff out there."

“And it’s not this idea anymore that you wait until you graduate; that’s when you’d start trying to figure out what to do. Like, no, start doing it now. Like start putting out songs now.”

Tyler Jacques had basically finished his music education degree at Lawrence and had entered the uncomfortable “Now what?” time zone.

“I was on the back half of COVID realizing, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this,’” Jaques said. “‘And, I don’t know if I actually know how to do this.’”

He heard about the “Entrepreneurial Musician” class from a friend, so he signed up.

“It was kind of a no-harm situation,” said Jaques. “And so I did, and it was wonderful.”

He had an idea that had been flowing in the back of his head — becoming a voice actor. Once the class began, that leaped to his frontal lobe.

“I hadn’t done any formal training,” Jaques said. “I started my first formal acting class at the same time as the ‘Entrepreneurial Musician,’ and then that’s when things started to really snowball."

“Because me talking about the business side and then also working on the craft of acting just gave me a lot of inspiration during that time period where I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, like this does feel good. This is what I should be doing.’”

Jacques said he has spent the past two years concentrating on vocal training as well as formulating his business plan, because breaking into the voice acting field is just as testing as trying to become an actor.

He said voice actors are in demand for commercials, animation and video games. So far, he’s done an audio book and the audio dialogue replacement for a foreign film. He’s at the point, he said, where’s he ready to pursue his career in earnest.

A career that came to being through one class.

“I’m very grateful to the class because it led to a lot of really good conversations with my best friend, who was in it,” Jaques said. “So we would talk about what our dreams were. And it really just helped me realize being in that class, being in that environment, with people where we were free to manifest a different future for ourselves than what we’d been working toward before, or perhaps had been working toward but never got the chance to fully dive in."

“And it just gave me that chance to flesh out these ideas and realize that they were very valid and feasible.”

Story idea? You can reach Mike Woods at 920-246-6321 or at: michael.t.woods1@charter.com