Senior Profile: Kasha Prinzing – Advancing in Art

Five years ago, senior Kasha Prinzing was ready to quit piano. She had become burned out and wanted to stop practicing the instrument that she had been playing for the previous eight years.

Now, Prinzing is grateful that she stuck with it.

“[My mom told me] if you drop it right now, you won’t go back to it when you’re [an] adult, you won’t stick with it through college, and then you won’t have it for life,” Prinzing said. “So I stuck with it, and I’m really glad I did.”

This fall, Prinzing will be attending St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota to start work on her double major in piano performance and English literature. Prinzing applied for piano and art scholarships at the college, in addition to her academic scholarships. Later, she found out that she had received the second best scholarship for art and the best scholarship available for piano. The scholarships will help to reduce the cost of tuition to less than half of the normal cost.

“St. Olaf was always my first choice once I saw it,” Prinzing said. “It wasn’t the first one I visited, but it was the first one where I was like, ‘I can live here.’”

Prinzing said that St. Olaf’s also made the top of her seven college list because of their piano program and faculty.

At the beginning of elementary school, Prinzing started taking lessons and has been learning and improving for the past 14 years. For her, the best part about playing is letting others enjoy the music.

“I don’t like practicing, but I do enjoy performing for other people because I feel like it’s just a cool way to share my love of music with others,” Prinzing said. “[Also to] kind of have them understand, like ‘This is really cool, wow this composer was a genius.’ So, I think it’s just a cool way to share with other people the music.”

Although her piano playing is helping pay for college, Prinzing isn’t planning on going into a piano performance career, due to the stress and highly competitive nature of the job. However, she plans on keeping music a part of her life. In the future, Prinzing says that she may give piano lessons to beginning- and intermediate-level students, but her main career will be focused around one of her other interests, reading.

“I was like, ‘You know what, I enjoy reading so much I think I should make more books,” Prinzing said. “Because books are cool, and there should be more of them in the world, and so I just kind of decided, you know what, I need to write books.”