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Actors dilemma: Theater major vs. no theater major


Pursuing a theater degree can provide opportunities for actors to build a solid resume.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of teenagers perform in dramatic productions at their local high school or their community theater. Many of these young actors discover a passion for the arts and decide they want to pursue drama as a lifelong career. Upon graduating high school, however, they face a dilemma.

They can either go to college for a degree in theater arts or audition themselves straight into the world of show biz.

“Performing is a passion of mine so I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” says Brynn Williams, who started auditioning for theater when she was 5 years old. Although she never attended a university, she has been in five Broadway shows, and acknowledges that perseverance and dedication are necessary for the success of any performer.

Nearly all universities have theater departments, but some are fully dedicated to the performing arts or have entire sub-schools devoted to the field. These schools focus a great deal of their advertising emphasizing their ability to teach and improve performances of their students.

For instance, the drama department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts states on its home page that it is “dedicated to providing students with the artistic and intellectual foundations necessary for a professional life in the professional theatre and allied disciplines.”

Actors are sometimes skeptical of such statements. Williams says he believes that trial and error is the best way to sharpen one's theatrical capabilities.

But Kate Hart, a junior at Emerson College, says she thinks that classes can accelerate the process of learning.

“We don’t have to learn things the long way, through experience,” Hart says. "We can learn directly." She adds that a lot of time is invested in learning acting theory, such as method acting or Stanislavski’s system.

A college degree certainly can be added to an actor’s resume. But the resumes of performers differ from those of other job applicants. These documents emphasize what roles the performer has played and at what venues he or she has acted. A degree is not a necessary prerequisite in the same way that someone looking to be a doctor needs a medical license -- and GPA is usually not even mentioned.

At college, especially for theater majors, there will are many shows with potential roles to build a resume. Likewise, there are hundreds of open auditions every month across the country at professional venues. Often, the more difficult it is to make a part, the better it looks on a resume.

For those who simply want to improve their auditions, master classes and workshops can be a cheap alternative to spending thousands of dollars every semester.

“These classes are taught by people who have gone through the process before,” says Williams. “You pay around $50 and someone who is in a Broadway show or a casting director will talk to you or look at your audition piece and tell you what’s right and wrong with it.” She adds that these do not last long because they are direct and to the point.

Because of tuition costs, many theater arts majors start off their careers with debt. Hart admits that being an actor is not the most lucrative profession.

“It is not easy to pay off college loans with a theater degree,” she says. “You don’t go into theater to be rich.”

Theater majors may also get education degrees, allowing a potentially more stable career in theater education as something to fall back on. But as the saying goes, if you don’t have something to fall back on, you simply don’t fall back.

Jeremy Goldman is a Summer 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here. Reach him via e-mail at jeremy.goldman@tufts.edu

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.