Going to school is hard. Running a business is also hard. Combining the two is nearly impossible. Yet, that’s exactly what Shadrick Beechum is doing during his time attending Southeast Missouri State University.

Beechum is a psychology major in school. In his senior year, he is certainly not taking the traditional route through school. Being a part-time student most of his time in college, he has taken his time and made sure to enjoy the experience. Being part-time also allowed him to pursue other interests of his, like audio production.

With audio production, Beechum is able to focus some of his energy into another path he is passionate about. Not only is he passionate about it, but also he’s made a business, SB Studios, out of audio production. He works with bands from around the Cape Girardeau area, and he is able to create their albums piece by piece. He also creates stock audio that can be used on television or films.

Despite the vast difference in interests of psychology and audio production, Beechum does have a future career plan.

“One of the big things to try to bridge the two is looking into music therapy,” Beechum said. “There’s a lot of veterans that come home and suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). There’s drug therapies for them, but there’s also new research done on music therapy, and I thought that would be really cool and be something I could focus on.”

When it comes to psychology influences, Beechum said he has had one strong influence — psychologist Stanley Milgrim. Milgrim is the creator of the Stanford prison experiment.

“Seeing the polarity of human behavior through his experiments was pretty crazy and really sparked my interest into that,” Beechum said on the experiment.

His musical influences are more personal. After being in his high-school band as a trumpet player, his friends began playing guitars and “kind of forced me into it.” Ten years later, he is still going strong with his passion for music through production and his time playing with his band Endseeker.

Beechum values his education, but school has never been in the forefront for him. He’s taking his time with school and doesn’t have a set graduation time.

“I view myself different than most students,” Beechum said. “Most people move away, go to college full time and live on campus, and I was never like that.”

Being a longtime student, Beechum has a different perspective on school and has advice for freshmen or, really, any students out there.

“Don’t get caught up on knowing what you want to do right away. I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Beechum said. “It took me two or three semesters of just taking gen ed classes to really figure out what I’m doing. If you end up switching majors, it’s not the end of the world. I tell people, ‘Do what makes you happy, just kind of go with your gut.’”