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btw, Hoveringmom changed her CC handle a while back. The happy ending for this story is that her daughter ended up with many wonderful options, and chose Northwestern. From all reports, she loves it.
stagemum, yes, I am getting the sense of Fordham as being a nurturing program. I want to give credit to SandKmom, whose posts here alerted us to the program in the first place. The theater program is small and tightly-knit. As someone who teaches in a large-ish university and who has 3 older kids who went through, or are going through college, I am impressed by the level of interaction between faculty, students, and staff at Fordham. For my daughter, who enjoys being an independent thinker, it seems to be about the right balance. I was surprised, and not in a bad way, to learn that the kids call the formidable department chair by his first name, etc.
My daughter is an acting major, but she is also a playwriting major, one of only two in her year. That's about as close-knit as you can get. She is also one of only two playwriting/acting double majors in the program (the other being SandKmom's son.) I am impressed at how the school works with them to make the course scheduling possible (trust me, this sort of cooperative support does not happen at every school. Many times, at my own university, and other places, I have witnessed students stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to fulfill requirements with impossible scheduling conflicts.)
Here is an example of the nurturing I've seen at Fordham. I don't want to go into much detail, but early this semester, there was an incident in which a male upperclassman (not a theater major) behaved problematically towards some freshman girls during auditions for a project. Each girl stopped her audition (kudos to them for having the self-assurance to do that-- I myself would not have had such presence of mind at 18.) They described their experience to older theater majors, who took the matter to the administration. Administrators invited the girls in to talk, asking the girls to weigh in on the solution. I was impressed by how sensitively the matter was handled, how the older students played a concerned and protective (but not suffocating) role, and how the administration acted swiftly to ensure that the freshmen felt safe in their environment. The reaction was mindful, not paternalistic, and the end result was a learning experience for everyone-- exactly what I would have hoped for. It was nothing like the kind of top-down bureaucratic response I remember from my own far-off days of Catholic school.
It's easy to be satisfied when things are going smoothly, but there will *always* be bumps in the road. I was glad to see this "bump" now, early on, because it gave me reassuring information about the process.
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