IU student survives car crash, rediscovers music

It took months to prepare for the 10 minutes Kacie Swierk would play for her audition. Months spent practicing, for hours a day, alone.

In the fall, Swierk, a freshman, arrived at IU to study business. A major in entrepreneurship. Maybe marketing or sales.

But ever since the car accident her junior year of high school, playing the piano became more than a hobby for her.

And as a business major, she didn’t have time to play.

Something in her life had to change, she said.

Around Thanksgiving, Swierk decided she would audition for the Jacobs School of Music jazz studies program.

“I’ve never auditioned before, for anything,” Swierk said. “And so I have no clue if I’m going to be nervous, if I’m going to be totally chill, if my hands are going to be shaking, if I’m not going to be able to play.”

On a normal day, Swierk wakes up in Ashton Center at 7:30 a.m. With her first class not for another two hours, she eats breakfast and sits down at a piano.

For the audition, she was asked to perform three jazz tunes, to execute a few scales and to perform a movement from a Beethoven sonata, which Swierk, not classically trained, said she dreaded.

She tries to practice at least four hours a day, but with a full, 18-credit-hour course load, Swierk will find a piano to practice anywhere on campus any spare moment she has.

She usually won’t finish her day until about midnight.

About 25 percent of those who audition will make it into the music school, said Ben Smith, graduate assistant for the Jacobs School of Music office of admissions and financial aid.

Every year, he said, thousands of graduate and undergraduate students from around the world come to Bloomington for a spot in the music school.

“We are consistently ranked in the top three to five music schools in the nation,” Smith said.

Swierk said she never thought she was worthy of Jacobs.

“I feel like I’m not the regular student that Jacobs looks for,” she said. “I feel like they look for people who have been playing all their life and are really committed to it forever, not just like, I don’t know, a year.”

Her attitude toward music changed after she survived a car accident.

The car that struck Swierk almost two years ago could of ended her life.

Instead, it altered its course.

Yet all she can remember from the accident is a blinding wash of white light. She doesn’t remember the car hitting her, or how her bicycle wound up more than 10 feet away.

“This insane calmness and peacefulness came totally over me,” Swierk said. “Maybe I was out on the ground for, like, four seconds. It wasn’t a long time, but it felt like I was in that forever.”

Bruised and cut, with a concussion from a 35-mile-per-hour impact to the left side of her head, the then-junior at New Trier High School from Winnetka, Ill., lay unconscious
in the street.

“I should have broken bones, for sure,” she said.

As she recovered, her head aching almost constantly, a few things changed in herself soon after the accident, she said.

She felt smarter. She said she was able to grasp concepts easier. Her ACT score rose.

While playing a piano, she said she experienced something she hadn’t felt before when playing.

“I just found myself really, really feelin’ it,” Swierk said.

“And I was getting so into it and getting all of these ideas that I had never been taught.
And so I just really, really quickly got so much better.”

The events of the accident and the white light, Swierk said, didn’t begin to make sense to her until years later.

“It was this November that I started piecing everything together,” Swierk said.

“And personally, I believe that whether it be heaven or not, it was some supernatural place that I was in. Like you don’t find this peace, or this whiteness, anywhere in this world. It was like this divine light. And at that point I really didn’t believe in
anything.”

Swierk was raised Catholic, but attending mass didn’t mean much to her, she said.
Recently Swierk has been spending Sunday mornings at Evangelical Community Church on Third Street, playing guitar in their band.

She also participates and plays keyboard for Cru, a Christian student group on campus.

“The fact that I’ve wanted to run away from religion all my life — and that was my plan coming to college — I didn’t want anything to do with this stuff,” Swierk said. “And then it just all hit me.”

The first thing Swierk did when she left the Music Addition building Feb. 8, her audition behind her, was change out of her black dress and stuff it in her backpack.

“I thought I was going to be way more nervous than I was,” she said.

She would have to wait anywhere between two weeks and two months to find out if she was accepted into the jazz studies program.

She’s still waiting, but she said she looks forward to the wait on the decision being over.

“I’m super excited for the stress to be over and to be out of my hands,” Swierk said. “I did what I did. It’s over.”

While Swierk will have some extra time to spend with friends, she is not finished practicing her instrument.

She said she will practice for herself, though, not for Jacobs.

“I’m kind of getting my life back a little bit,” she said.

But already, Swierk has accepted a new challenge.

A runner, she will be competing in the Little Fifty relay race in April and plans to train six days a week for it.

“Yes, I’m competitive,” Swierk said. “Hopefully a nice competitive. I’m competitive with other people, but I feel like I’m more competitive with myself. I always want to push myself to do better.”