Some thoughts for parents w Juniors planning ahead for next year…
When my D was a sophomore, I asked her voice coach when we needed to get started preparing for college auditions. She told me 1 year ahead or more. During Fall or my D’s Junior year, she studied for the SAT. Got a private tutor and studied weekly and did weekly practice tests during the winter leading up to the Winter SAT test. She nailed the test, and got a high score. This completed this important task, eliminated the need to take the test again to get better scores, and set her up to get substantical merit scholarships (some of which she has already been awarded here in her Senior Year). Investing in private SAT tutoring had a huge Return on Investment for us. From what I have seen on the college net price calculators, the SAT/ACT score seems to make more of a difference than grades, though a high GPA is important too to get the highest merit scholarships.
During Winter of her Senior Year we hired Chelsea at MCA to help us plan out the process of applying to colleges and round out a college application list. Sure, we new all the big name fancy schools, but the less well known colleges with great programs we couldn’t figure out on own. Very, very worthwhile investment hiring Chelsea! Got a list of schools and new what to focus on, and what not. Knew which ones were reaches, fits, and safeties.
Next my D and Chelsea worked up a list of possible monologues. My D then refined this with her local voice coach. (FYI she’s applying for BFA Acting, not MT). By end of Spring, she had her monologues picked and was practicing them.
Over the summer she went to a couple of camps and continued to practice and refine her monologues.
By end of summer D started on Common App and reviewing other applications. The applications and the essays turned out to be a constantly growing monster of sorts. At first we thought there was 1 common app essay and a couple other private college essays. By the time D was done with all essays and questions prompts, she probably wrote 40-50 essays/question responses. Some colleges have 5-8 essays and questions when you included their supplemental apps. And often you don’t get to see that until you’ve completed the main app, and they give you access to their acceptd or slideroom supplemental area for performing arts students.
The prescreens we started working on in end of August. We did those ourselves. I am a very skilled with video shooting and editing. But I am not an actor. So I didn’t really know how to coach my D’s performances on screen. We would shoot a number of takes, and then meet with our vocal coach to review a few days later. This was a lot of back and forth over weeks, but we eventually got these done by the end of September. They are not as simple as they might seem. She had 3 different monologues to shoot, and some schools wanted closeups, some wanted 3/4 shots, some wanted full body, some didn’t care, some wanted 1 minute cuts, some wanted 90 second cuts, some wanted the videos uploaded separately, some wanted them edited into one video, some wanted simple introductions, some wanted detailed personal introductions. I had to create matrix of all the shots and edits I needed to make. It was lot of work. By the end of the process I had done this so much with my D that I had learned how to coach her shots, and figured out what to look for in a good take. But that’s after 70 or more takes.
There are some coaches/companies that offer video for prescreens as a service. If this is not your skill set, then hiring one of those might be a great idea. Production value (i.e. how professional it looks) doesn’t matter that much. What does matter is getting a great performance on video that meets all the technical requirements they spec (i.e. time length, slating, etc.). Having a great coach that can be there during the filming would speed things up immensely. I understand Chelsea at MCA offers this, as do the MTCA people. Others probably do too I am sure. We didn’t use Chelsea as she is in Boston and we are in California. And MTCA works with MT kids, and my D did acting. Plus I knew how to do all this, so I thought it would be easier to do it ourselves. Frankly I don’t know which is better… by doing it ourselves, we did get to constantly refine it. Which maybe gave us a better result. Hiring someone else would have gotten it done faster, but I don’t know if that would’ve been better or not, as we would have a time limit on the shooting sessions.
By the end of September, D had all prescreens done, and her main essays and applications done. She applied to a few early action schools. She got accepted to two audition based BFAs and one BA so far with scholarships at all 3. She got declined on 4 of her prescreens with one painful rejection from her first choice school. But we now have a full slate of good audition opportunities coming up here in January and February.
Getting started early is ESSENTIAL if you want to maximize your chances. You should have your college list done early in 2019, get your audition material chosen and start rehearsing it. By summer you need to start preparing to shoot prescreens. August and September are fine to shoot them. But you need to be rehearsing and ready to shoot ahead of that. And to do that you need to know the schools you are applying to and what their specific prescreen requirements are. Then doing all the essays and applications takes time. It’s just a grind. Oh, and we also hired an essay coach through Chelsea at MCA. VERY helpful to have this advice. I am good writer, but knowing what to write about is the key to success with these and I did not know what to write about to advise my kid.
My D has applied to 20+ schools - I have lost track of how many 
Some are BFAs and some are BAs. In March of 2019 she will have some very good choices to pick from with scholarship money.
I know to some people this process seems random or sounds like a “lottery”. That’s not accurate. Preparation and casting a wide net will get you some, possibly many great choices. There is no sure way to get your kid into their top school of choice though. That is where the random element does come in. Many of these programs only take 10-15 kids a year and get hundreds of applications. But if you cast a wide net, and prepare, you can get a few great choices out of it.