LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Audio engineer on her career journey

My name is Kelly Kramerick. I'm 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.

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 recreating the world that we already recorded in a studio setting. So, we have more control over it.

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. It was all about, you know, microphones and speakers and music. 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 multi-disciplinary studies, which is when three minors make up your major. We didn't have a music tech major program, so that's how I kind of finagled it. Then, I studied theater and advertising. The theater side of things, I did theater sound design, which audio engineering and theater is huge. It's a whole other avenue that you can study.

Then, advertising, because I knew I was probably going to 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 in Multidisciplinary Studies three years ago. Immediately, I 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.

For about two years out here, for the first year, I did nothing but bartend. I was a bartender all through college, and I was bartending out here as well. 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." 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.

Once I started interning, I was interning at this studio this past summer. The way that I got that was just networking—those engineer meetup groups. When I go to every studio, I always talk to the owners. We had a meetup at this studio, and I came to it. I was talking to my boss, and he said to call him. So, I called him, and I sent him my resume, and he hired me as an intern.

I interned here for a while and over the summer. 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 LA. I got a call from a producer in New York, all asking me if I can do production audio for their gigs. I was like, "Yeah, like that’s awesome!" I'm wondering how they got my name, and I find out it's just from one connection where I did a good job.

So, they give my name out to people. One other way I guess I've been getting jobs is that production houses in Denver don't have audio people on staff. 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, saying, "If you ever need an audio person, let me know." 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.