AnQuan Lee Palmer Scholarship

I have been passionate about music for as long as I can remember. As a kid, while other kids were watching SpongeBob and playing with toys, I spent time on Pandora, shuffling through Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Michael Jackson songs and watching their music videos. I also spent lots of time watching Andrew Huang’s YouTube videos about music production and the recording process, and I was thrilled with the different electronic instruments and other unique items he used. For several Christmases in a row, my parents challenged themselves to find unique instruments as gifts, one of my favorites being an Ocarina that I thought was hilarious when I played it with my nose. Everything changed on Christmas of 2021, when I was gifted a MIDI keyboard. From there, I was hooked on music production. It took some research, but through watching Kenny Beats’ live streams on Twitch, lots of tutorial binge-watching, I found my style. Making beats is now a daily occurrence, and I have connected with lots of artists in the Chicago area. After college, I plan to pursue a career as an audio engineer and music producer. I have found that many of my peers are hanging out with friends, while I am focused on making beats, building my skills, and networking with people in the industry to develop my craft. I am dual enrolled at my local university and have had the privilege of running sessions with local talent in our studio on campus. It has been a very rewarding process to see a song come to fruition from me producing the beat to hearing the finished product. I have also been doing lots of work in my community. At my church, GatheringPoint, I started serving last summer as an audio engineer for the live streams and online services, and worked my way into being the audio engineer for the main house. I love how hands-on I get to be during the sermon and with the band performances. I have also focused on working with audio in the film world, as well. Last year at my school’s Career Center, I took a Multimedia Production class and learned a lot about both audio and video. At the end of the year, I wrote, directed, and worked on audio for a film that won a State-level contest, and I had the honor of competing at Nationals in Atlanta, Georgia. Due to some lucky networking, I connected with an engineer at Super Sound Studios and sat in at a session Killer Mike was recording in. It was inspiring to be in the same room as a team of Grammy-winning engineers and producers, and I have received lots of great mentorship and advice from them this past year. I have always had a passion for music production. I decided to teach myself on my Mom’s computer when I was fourteen, and I have loved the learning process since then. Although I do not have any music officially released, I do have lots of unreleased collaborations with musicians in my community. I have also connected and worked on songs with artists online, and I am very proud of the songs I have had a hand in writing and producing. Music is my dream, and the AnQuan Lee Palmer Scholarship would be a significant help in making my dreams of attending a university for music production a reality! After furthering my training, I know I would do a great job bringing my skills and talents to a greater audience. Thank you for your consideration as a candidate for the AnQuan Lee Palmer Scholarship.