In fourth grade, Hannah Paterson told her sister she wanted to play the flute. Her sister, already the family’s flute player — and uninterested in the competition — went to their parents with some exciting news: Hannah wanted to play trumpet.
For her tenth birthday, Hannah’s parents promised her an instrument — she was thrilled. When she opened the case and found a gleaming, brass trumpet staring back at her, her first thought was: “That’s not a flute.” But her parents had already signed her up for lessons, so she went with it. Somewhere in those first few weeks, her disappointment started to fade, and the trumpet started to feel like hers.
Choosing USM — and music education
Hannah has been playing the trumpet ever since. By the time she started applying to colleges, she’d already spent years of her life on and off the University of Southern Maine’s Gorham campus for youth camps and ensembles.
“There are pictures of me napping in corners of Corthell Hall,” she said. “I’ve really been learning here since I can remember.”
When she sat down to apply, USM felt like the obvious choice in some ways, and the wrong one in others. Perhaps she knew the place too well, she thought, and maybe she should venture out further from home. She applied to three schools and got into all of them.
What changed her mind wasn’t the cost, though that certainly helped. She’d already been studying with her trumpet instructor, Ryan Noe, for two years by then — he had helped her through high school, worked with her on college auditions, and when the time came to decide, encouraged her to weigh all of her options.
“He told me not to come just because of him,” Hannah said. “But by making sure I didn’t feel pressured, I knew he was always the best fit for me as an instructor.”
She chose USM, enrolling in the music education program that fall with a clear sense of where she was headed — not knowing yet how much would change.
Four days that changed her perspective
The International Women’s Brass Conference happens every two years and during Hannah’s sophomore year, it was coming to Hartford, Connecticut — closer to home than it had ever been. The conference was founded on a simple premise: that women in brass, long underrepresented in classical performance, deserved a space of their own. When Noe saw it was within reach, he encouraged his students to go, helping three of them secure USM Provost funding to make it happen.
What followed was four days of sessions, concerts, and competitions, all hosted by professional female brass players building the kinds of careers Hannah was starting to imagine for herself. During the conference, she stepped into the competition rounds, a chance to perform and measure her own playing against the standard she’d come there to learn from.
“It was just such a cool opportunity to feel like, for once, in a space like that, I wasn’t the minority,” she said. “There were 70 women in the room and only two guys.”
She came home from Hartford feeling a little different — more certain of what she wanted, and more convinced she could actually get there.
A music education degree, reconsidered
As a music education major, Hannah was in classrooms from her very first semester at USM — observing at first, then eventually teaching lessons of her own. By her second year, she was leading private lessons solo.
“I truly believe USM has one of the best music education programs on the East Coast,” she said. “Our professors are amazing at what they do — they know how to create amazing teachers.”
Despite that conviction, something didn’t sit right once she was the one standing in front of the classroom. Over the past few years she’d started to gravitate in a new direction, and Hartford had shown her a version of herself she hadn’t expected to like so much.
“I’ve come to realize I love music more on the performing side than the teaching side,” she said. “I just found that teaching in a traditional capacity isn’t for me.”
That left her at a crossroads. Hannah was two years into a music education degree — switching her focus now would mean starting over on a different set of requirements, almost certainly adding semesters, maybe even years, to a degree she was already halfway through.
“I was crunching the numbers, looking at the time left in college,” she said. “This is a big commitment — to switch my degree two years in.”
So instead of switching majors, she looked for another way to perform. Hartford had proven she could hold her own in a room like that — and that confidence was enough to make her seriously consider an idea she’d once been too unsure to follow through on.
Revisiting an old idea, making a new decision
When Hannah was a senior in high school, she’d briefly considered joining a military band — she loved performing, and loved the idea of traveling. But she wasn’t ready, not yet, to leave Maine or commit to something so life-changing. That idea sat untouched for years, until it resurfaced this past January.
“I started looking into military bands again,” said Hannah. “It was the opportunities and room for growth it presented — performing every day, traveling the world, meeting other amazing musicians.”
In April, she finally walked into a Marine recruiter’s office. She had a degree to finish and debt already attached to it — leaving either unresolved felt like a real risk.
“We went back and forth for two and a half hours,” she said. “By the end of it, I knew I was ready to take that leap.”
Five days later, she was reporting to the Military Entrance Processing Station, and just a week after that, she was swearing in with the Marines. She’s set to ship out on September 15, with just a couple months still ahead of her to prepare.
“I think this is going to be a challenging but exciting chapter of my life,” she said.
What she’s built at USM, and what’s next
As a USM tour guide, Hannah has said the same thing to prospective students more times than she can count: finding the right path in college can take time — a change of location, a different degree — but she’s never met anyone at USM who couldn’t find their people.
“You’ll always find community,” she said. “Whether it’s one friend or 20 — I’ve never met somebody who couldn’t make a friend at USM.”
For Hannah, that’s been true in more ways than one. Between her cohort of music students, the sorority she never expected to join, and the coworkers she’s spent years giving tours alongside, she’s built a community that stretches across nearly every corner of campus.
USM also opened doors: a trumpet instructor who pushed her toward bigger stages, funding to attend a transformative a conference, and the flexibility to find out what she really wanted before it was too late to change course.
She isn’t finished with USM, either. When she returns, she plans to switch her degree to performance and pick up pedagogy classes so she can teach private lessons of her own — just not in a classroom. For now, she’s headed somewhere new. But the trumpet that started as a birthday surprise, and the place that gave her room to grow into it, will both be waiting when she gets back.
