They Want 6th Graders to Choose a Career. Trina Martin Has a Better Idea.

What were you going to be when you grew up?

I was going to be a few things. So were you. By college the plan had changed completely. And then life happened, technology happened, and most of us ended up doing work that didn’t exist when we were sitting in a classroom trying to figure out the answer to that question.

That is not unusual. That is how careers actually work.

Two years ago, everyone was talking about prompt engineers. That was the career of the decade. Now AI writes its own prompts. The job evaporated before most people had finished building a curriculum to teach it.

And yet, school districts across Texas right now want sixth graders to choose a career path.

I sat down with Trina Martin, founder of Parents for Arts Education, and we talked about what Round Rock is getting right that a lot of people are getting dangerously wrong.

The Legislator Who Told the Truth by Accident

Trina has been fighting for arts education in Texas schools for years. Her whole career has been the through line. She came down from Dallas at 26 years old to open one of the first locations of a major music retailer in central Texas. She could read the city’s trajectory before the roads were even built. Within two years, that Round Rock store was the top-producing location in the entire chain.

She went from there to cause marketing, creating the Brook Mays Foundation for Music Education in 1996, which is worth noting because cause marketing was not a phrase anyone was using in 1996. She got Willie Nelson to cut a PSA. She booked the Fulmore Middle School band on the morning shows. She was building what she believed in long before the language existed to describe it.

After 9/11, she stepped back and became a full-time mom. Her kids, growing up with access to instruments and the best teachers in the city, became dancers. “That’s how you rebel against your mother,” she told me. Some throughlines skip a generation before they come back around.

In 2021, Lisa Robuck, the former fine arts director in Round Rock, called Trina the night before a state capital testimony. “How fast can you register a name?” she asked. “Because I need you to testify tomorrow.” Trina registered the name that night. That’s agility. That is how Parents for Arts Education was born.

But the moment that clarified everything came two years later. Trina was in a legislative meeting with a major fine arts director from a large district. They were making the case. The director stepped out of the room. The legislator looked at Trina and said: “Oh good, the teacher’s gone. I want to talk to you, the parent.”

That one sentence told her what the problem actually was. The parent voice in arts advocacy had never been organized across all disciplines. Educators had been making the case. Parents had never had a unified seat at the table. She went home and built the organization that would change that.

What AI Can Process vs. What Humans Create

Here is what is happening in education policy right now that should concern everyone who runs a business or hires people.

We are steering kids toward STEM and career-tech education at exactly the moment when AI is eating those disciplines from the inside out. AI processes math. It generates code. It analyzes data. It writes technical documentation faster and with fewer errors than most humans can manage. These capabilities are not going away. They are going to get more capable.

So the question is not whether we need people who understand technology. We do. The question is: what do humans bring that AI cannot replicate?

Creativity. Judgment. Empathy. The ability to tell a story that moves someone to act. The ability to collaborate under pressure. The ability to imagine something that does not exist yet and then convince other people it should.

Those are “human” arts skills. And we are systematically cutting the programs that develop them.

What story are you telling yourself about what skills will matter in your organization five years from now?

The Career You Could Not Have Planned

My brother Jeffrey and I pioneered conversion rate optimization at a time when the discipline did not have a name. Nobody told us in school that was going to be a career. Nobody could have. It didn’t exist yet. We built toward it through skills, experiences, curiosity, and a lot of trial and error.

Trina’s career looks the same way in retrospect. Music retail. Cause marketing. Foundation work. Full-time parenting. Dance mom. Nonprofit founder. Legislative advocate. TEDx speaker. None of those things appear on a single career track. They were all moves made by someone who knew what she cared about and kept finding new arenas to fight for it.

Growing up as an Air Force brat, Trina moved to three different high schools in three different states. Her dad made colonel when she was in seventh grade. The family moved almost every year. She arrived in new cities knowing nobody.

What kept her sane? Band. Every time she landed somewhere new, she walked into the band room before she knew a single person’s name. She had a community before she had a friend. She had a role before she had a reputation. The arts gave her a portable identity, something she could carry across every transition.

That is not a soft skill. That is the core skill. The ability to walk into an unfamiliar room and find your footing is what every career eventually demands. No worksheet about choosing a career path in sixth grade teaches that.

Customer Centricity Starts With Understanding People

In Be Like Amazon, one of the four pillars we talk about is customer centricity. Obsessing over the customer, not the competition. Understanding what people actually need, not just what they say they want.

That capability, the ability to listen, observe, read a room, and respond to what is actually happening rather than what the data says should be happening, is a human skill. It is built through experience with other humans. Theater rehearsals teach it. Orchestra performances teach it. Dance recitals teach it. You learn to read your audience, adjust in real time, and deliver when it counts.

The businesses that will thrive in an AI-saturated market will not win because they have better algorithms. Every competitor will have access to similar tools. They will win because they have people who can connect with other people in ways that machines cannot simulate. People who were given the space, early on, to develop that capacity.

What Round Rock Is Getting Right

Round Rock has one of the strongest fine arts programs of any school district in Texas. That is not an accident. It is a decision, made over time by administrators, advocates, parents, and board members who chose to believe that developing the whole person matters for outcomes that show up long after graduation.

Trina gave her TEDx talk at TEDx Round Rock Women and it crystallized everything she has been building for years. She walked into the green room before her talk, put in her AirPods, air-drummed to rock music in a back hallway to get into her zone, then walked out and delivered. She was not nervous. She was ready. That is what years of performance training does to a person. You learn to show up when it matters.

When I look at why Round Rock attracts talent and businesses keep building here, I think about the kind of people this community produces. People who can think, create, collaborate, and perform. People who had arts programs that gave them something they could not have named at the time but that has been present in everything they have built since.

Maybe that is not a coincidence.

The Question Worth Sitting With

We are about to make a serious mistake. We are going to cut the programs that develop human creativity at exactly the moment when human creativity is the only durable competitive advantage we have left. We are going to ask children to choose careers before they have had the chance to discover who they are.

What were you going to be when you grew up? How many times did the answer change? What experiences shaped the person you actually became, and were any of them the ones a guidance counselor mapped out for you on a career worksheet?

Listen to my full conversation with Trina Martin on Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders. And if you care about what is happening to arts education in Texas, visit parentsforartseducation.org and get involved.