Ask Questions To Current MT's

MichaelNKat
Sat, 21 Feb 2009 08:43:54 +0000

I don’t want to encroach on sweetclyde’s thread or its purpose, but since the YouTube project will probably take some time and you may want a more immediate response, here’s where you can find some of your answers in the interim. On the Uarts’ website, if you click on “Academics” at the left side of the home page and then click on “The Study Abroad Office” link, again on the left side of the next page that appears, you will get to the page on study abroad programs. In a nutshell, UArts does not yet have its own study abroad program but has an affiliation with Arcadia University which has tremendous study abroad opportunities in general. In addition to the info there, at a presentation given by Charlie Gilbert (interim head of SOTA), he advised that UArts is in the process of developing its own focused study abroad theatre program. Further, if you navigate to the UArts MT page, on the left there is a link to the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, with which UArts has an exchange program that usually occurs, I think, during the winter break.

For what it’s worth, when my daughter was looking at schools, we were initially dazzled by certain of the schools on her list that had well established semester long study abroad programs in theatre or MT. While such programs are certainly wonderful learning opportunities and experiences on many levels, there are some countervailing considerations. In looking at such a program, it is important to understand and think through how it will impact on you sequencing through the very structured curriculum at your school. BFA programs usually have a very defined sequence of courses that a student takes to meet very specific training goals and objectives that are built into the BFA curriculum. A study abroad program pulls you out of this sequence. So you need to explore what this really means at your school and how it may impact on you. It’s not the same as if you were a liberal arts student who is meeting liberal arts requirements during a study abroad. In addition, at many BFA programs, by the end of your freshman year, you end up in a cohort of students who will progress together through the sequence of acting and certain other studio courses. Taking a semester abroad will pull you out of that cohort and you could end up with another group of students or will have missed a semester of working with your cohort upon your return.

After giving it some thought, we concluded that the availability of study abroad, while enticing, was really secondary for BFA programs and that the nature of the on campus program was far more important. The availability of summer study abroad theatre programs, for us, removed the semester based study abroad factor from our list of criteria in evaluating schools.