Theatre Design Major

Lizzy5851
Thu, 20 Feb 2014 03:04:20 +0000

@costumedesign1 - We liked Emerson. The facilities are very nice (performance space and costume shop / design studio) and the program looks strong. The 2 things working against Emerson for us were 1) the size of the school. My daughter really wanted a university and Emerson is a bit cozy. and 2) reputation and networking. We didn’t feel that Emerson would provide the same level of career support through alumni networks and reputation/name recognition that CMU and some others would. However, the Emerson program was impressive and I’m sure that the costume students get great training and lots of experience. Definitely worth a visit so you can rank the program for yourself.

Our approach was to keep a list of all the programs, do our research and rank the schools against my daughter’s own criteria. Knowing how competitive it can be, the goal was to have a ranked list of schools that she could be happy with, and take schools off the list only after finding something objectionable. CMU was number one for her, so she applied early and got in - process complete. #2 was Univ. of Michigan and #3 was Ithaca. Your list will probably be different, but the process helped to keep us all sane because it was about prioritizing. I honestly think my Daughter would have been very happy at U. of Michigan or Ithaca, if Carnegie had not worked out!

One other thing to think about - - we tried to see a performance at most schools we visited. It got a little crazy to schedule the visits when shows were in production, but it really helped to understand the overall quality of the programs. We were very glad that we did see shows and it played a huge role in helping her figure out what she wanted.

:-)