Attend UCLA to "plug into" LA Dance Scene?

Twoin18
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 23:51:12 +0000

It’s not clear to me how “light” a load you really can take at UCLA and still be a full time student (I think the cutoff is 12 credits which is still 3 classes). By careful course selection you can sometimes get all of those courses on 3 days (though 4 days is more common) since you usually have 2 days of lectures plus 1 TA section on a different day, but you may need to take courses with MW and TTh lectures when that’s all that is available in the second pass selection.

Living on campus at UCLA isn’t hugely convenient for getting around LA, the main option is buses which take at least an hour to get downtown, because there’s no subway in Westwood. And don’t take a car, the parking is a nightmare.

The one dancer we met from the audition tour that did choose UCLA was treating the dance major as additional to other academics (she was a Regents Scholar). Conversely the dancers we met at Chapman were very keen on gaining out of school (commercial) dance experience, the obvious option being Disneyland just down the road, but they would also take the train from right outside campus up to downtown LA. You might ask how Chapman treat transfer credits, my impression is that both public and private CA schools take a lot of transfers. And even though Chapman is quite expensive, they do have a fair amount of merit aid unlike UCLA.

Although UCI is slightly closer to the city as the crow flies, getting from that campus to downtown LA seems much less straightforward, and we didn’t meet any USC dancers, that is an incredibly selective audition process even at the prescreen stage.