{"id":12474,"date":"2019-05-09T13:50:35","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T18:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/?p=12474"},"modified":"2026-01-20T17:50:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T22:50:27","slug":"student-spotlight-mark-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/student-spotlight-mark-walker\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Spotlight: Mark Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-how-mark-walker-balanced-touring-teaching-and-completing-a-berklee-online-degree\">How Mark Walker Balanced Touring, Teaching, and Completing a Berklee Online Degree<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Mark Walker is a Grammy award-winning drummer, a professor in the Percussion department at Berklee College of Music, and an instructor at Berklee Online. After this weekend, he\u2019ll also be a Berklee Online graduate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After high school, Mark took a gap year. This ended up being a 35-year gap year. That ended when Mark\u2019s friend, Debbie Cavalier, encouraged him to start taking classes at Berklee Online. Cavalier, incidentally, is not just any friend. She\u2019s the CEO of Berklee Online. At first, Mark wasn\u2019t sure he could do it. He was taking three classes at once while traveling. Yet, he focused on the coursework while at the airport and it showed him that he could actually do it.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe fact that it is flexible and I don\u2019t need to be there at a certain time, that\u2019s been great,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s probably why I haven\u2019t gone to school all these years because I was traveling so much. I\u2019ve submitted assignments from a flight in Japan.\u201d<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Studying at Berklee Online allowed <a href=\"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/instructors\/mark-walker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mark <\/a>to explore new areas. Majoring in Interdisciplinary Music Studies, he studied topics such as music production, composition, and songwriting. <br><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cOne thing that really surprised me was the songwriting courses,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m a jazz musician and never thought I\u2019d be writing songs.\u201d<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He has written so many songs, in fact, that he made an album of them: His new release, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/store.cdbaby.com\/cd\/markwalker22\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">You Get What You Give<\/a><\/em><strong> <\/strong>began life as a capstone project for school. For the project, he created a business plan for the release and marketing of the album. He self-produced the album and recorded it all at Berklee College of Music.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"3263\" height=\"2997\" src=\"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Mark-Walker-5-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12478\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI would highly recommend Berklee Online to anyone who wants to learn about any aspect of the music industry,\u201d he says.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Walker, is a Grammy award-winning drummer, a professor in the Percussion department at Berklee College of Music, and an instructor of Afro-Cuban Drums at Berklee Online. And after this weekend, he\u2019ll also be a Berklee Online graduate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":12475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,9560,32],"tags":[6196,407,6195,1364,1365,1366],"class_list":["post-12474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-instructor-profiles","category-spotlight","category-student-stories","tag-afro-cuban-drums","tag-debbie-cavalier","tag-mark-walker","tag-student","tag-student-spotlight","tag-student-stories"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.8 (Yoast SEO v25.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Student Spotlight: Mark Walker - Berklee Online Take Note<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mark Walker is a Grammy award-winning drummer and an instructor of the Afro-Cuban Drum course at Berklee Online. 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