My Audition Experience: Carnegie Mellon

operationgold7
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:59:16 +0000

I had my Carnegie Mellon audition this morning at 8 AM at the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh. I’ll explain how my audition went, so those of you auditioning can understand the basics of how it all happens. Note that off-campus auditions may be different.

Students and parents were led to a holding room where CMU students checked in the applicants. Applicants had to fill out an info sheet, turn in their headshot/resume, and have their picture taken by a CMU student. Then, at around 8:30, two female professors, (who I later found out were also the auditors), and the head of the School of Drama each gave short speeches about the program. They were all very friendly and inviting!

CMU students then gave parents a tour of the arts building while one of the professor/auditors led us applicants in a rousing round of Pass The Clap and ZipZapZop. As I already said, everybody was really, REALLY friendly and nice. During our game, I was able to count how many auditioners were with me at the morning session: around 30.

By the end of the game, it was a little after 9:00 and we were brought back to the holding room. One CMU student picked up the stack of auditioner’s resumes on the check-in desk and called out the first five names. Those students were led out to the hallway while the rest of us remained in the holding room. There was a practice room down the hall for those who wanted to use it and CMU students were selling bagels and coffee.

Every 10ish minutes, they would call the next two or three names from the stack. I was third from the bottom. Hooray for waiting!

I was called out to the hallway a little after 11. By then, the parents had gotten back from the tour (which was quite good, I hear) and people started showing up for the noon audition session.

Now that I was waiting in the hallway, I saw that there were two audition rooms, each one audited by one of the two female professors from earlier. After 10-ish minutes of waiting, (which wasn’t boring because it was spent talking to other applicants and a CMU sophomore), I was called into the audition room.

My auditor was the same professor who led our games from earlier. I could tell that she was nice before, but she was OBSCENELY NICE AND FRIENDLY during this audition. I started with my comedic Eric Bogosian monologue…and she actually LAUGHED during it! It took four auditions for somebody to FINALLY find it funny! After that, I did my Shakespeare monologue. She asked me to do it again, but with a different physicality. After doing it with her direction, she asked to see a third monologue. The two other pieces I had prepared for situations like this were my “back-ups” and not nearly as well-prepared as my two “openers.” Before I had the opportunity to perform one of the back-ups, she noticed that I had “Brighton Beach Memoirs” on my resume, and she asked if I remembered anything from that show. That show closed in May 2009, but I still somehow remembered an entire monologue from it! I did the monologue suprisingly well for not doing it in months and months. Then she asked me some questions about where else I was applying to college. After that short interview, she sent me over to the other auditor to perform my monologues for her! The other auditor was also obscenely nice. Everybody I met in Pittsburgh was obscenely nice. It was kinda bizarre… Anyway, I digress. I did my three monologues for the second auditor, utilizing some tips about physicality that the first auditor gave me. The second auditor then asked me the same college based questions the first auditor asked. Then, I left.

Overall, this was my favorite audition out of the four so far. The audition staff and the CMU students I met were incredibly nice and accessable and the auditors are great fun to work with! I really hope my last two auditions are like this…

If anybody has any questions about the CMU audition or wants to share their own experience, go ahead and ask and share!

Next up: SUNY Purchase, February 6th at 10 AM in San Francisco…