Acting BFA vs BA for a double major

lovetoact
Mon, 14 May 2018 13:10:57 +0000

In general, you might be able to do a BFA if you really want to, but you’ll have to make some concessions and plan ahead. However, one concession might be that you can’t do a lab science as your other major. Science lab requirements rival the BFA studio requirements in amount of time you need to spend, and it’s really, really hard, if impossible, to fit both of those in. You could decide on something like public health as your other major and stay within the sciences, but a physics major may not be possible. Another concession is that you might not be able to do the double major at all at some schools with a BFA based on departmental requirements, so you should research each individual school and a school that might be your dream acting school might not be the one for you if you want to do both.

My daughter attended UMBC (which is well-known for its STEM majors, so you might want to look into it if Maryland is in your geographical area for college) and got a BFA in Acting and a BA in French. She had the advantage of coming in with more than 40 college credits from her high school AP and college-level-high-school-classes, so she had no core classes to take in college, which left room for the French classes. This might not work for some schools, as some will give you elective credit, but won’t give you credit for specific classes, so you’ll still have to take core classes. And even if you have AP sciences under your belt (like my daughter did), you might still have to take basic level courses in the sciences if you have a major or minor in those areas. Schools want to make sure that you know what they want you to know for your foundational knowledge, so they usually make you take the intro courses in your major, even if your AP credits would have covered them if you were a different major.

Also, toward the end of her college career, it was very difficult to finish both majors, as each had limited numbers of classes for the upper-level requirements, so if the one French class that she had left was at the same time as the one Acting class that she had left, she may have had to make a difficult decision to drop one. Fortunately, her French professors were flexible and helped her to complete all requirements.