Sweetwater Sound representative speaks on career opportunities

On Wednesday, Oct. 31, Jeff McDonald, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Sweetwater Sound, came to the Shircliff Humanities building to give a presentation over the company to students. SweetWater Sound is a music company that focuses on music recording. It was founded in 1979 and is located in Fort Wayne, according to the company’s website. Sweetwater Sound is known for being the number one online audio equipment retailer and for building strong relationships with different companies and universities. The company gives students with audio recording majors opportunities to work at Sweetwater. They don’t just offer music related jobs, but other jobs outside of music such as IT and writing positions.

“Our business is growing at about 20 percent,” said McDonald.

Sweetwater Sound owns nine other companies, and McDonald predicts that in three years, they’ll own a third of the industry.

According to McDonald, SweetWater Sound is like its own version of a community in which employees receive a lot of benefits on the campus. They have their own doctor’s office, hair salon and even a slide that their employees use.

Virgil Franklin, the program chair of audio recording, spoke at the start of the presentation. He said a lot of the equipment used by the program was purchased from Sweetwater Sound.

Franklin said the motivation behind the guest speaker was to provide students with the information about starting a career at Sweetwater.

McDonald encouraged students to become employees of Sweetwater Sound once they completed their majors. However, he also gave general career advice to students no matter their career path. He advised students to take writing and speech classes to help them prepare for any career.