I currently teach interactive new media graphics and am the Director of WEB and Interactive New Media at a private art college in Los Angeles. Yesterday a young woman consulted with me there. A five-minute advisory session became an hour of sharing and mentoring. She is lost. She has no one to advise her and is anxious about what to do with her life. She is considering studying interactive new media because her BA in literature from a prestigious university did not prepare her for the work world, nor does she feel that she yet has found her life “calling.” I knew I had calmed her anxiety slightly when she pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged in the chair across from me and stopped apologizing for taking my time.

I was honest when I suggested that new media studies might be just the ticket. It would allow her to explore the web, art, sound, video, music, writing, just about everything. That is why I went into it, I told her. We had already bonded over the fact that we were both black sheep, out of the box thinkers, bright and misunderstood by friends and families and loved all the Arts. Like me, she had begun to study music as a child, but abandoned it. She knew nothing of my music background or my Amy Beach new media project when she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "I could have been Beethoven."

It was a poignant moment. I remembered similar moments in my own life. Moments in young adulthood when I began to realize how my opportunities and choices had so often been limited by societal expectations and gender limiting rules. Now I was also wondering what might any of us girls and women have been, have tried, had we been exposed to plentiful women role models - women who resisted, rose above and went beyond gender prescribed fates.

Izzy, let's both be Beethovens with what time we each have. Let's both try to live by the words attributed to 19th century author, George Eliot, who hid behind a borrowed man's name in order to be published and taken seriously as a woman: "It is never too late to be what you might have been.” With this exploration of Amy Beach as a role model, I begin my journey of discovery.