<p>I'm trying to get a sense of what we're in for if S wants to be a theatre major. Do schools charge for auditions? If so, how much did you have to budget to audition at 5-10 schools?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>UCLA charged a $50 audition fee but 3 others did not. Apart from preparation, the big expense for auditions (or, in our case, portfolio showings) was the travel cost. Before my D got the audition dates, I assumed she would be able to schedule everything within a couple of days in the same city. As it happened, although all auditions were within a week of each other, they were split between LA and SF, so she could make some at home in the Bay Area, but had to fly to LA for a day to make a third, and then had to interview with one school by phone.</p>
<p>I auditioned for five schools and each charged around $40 for auditions, in addition to applying to the school (which is between %50 and $65). I live in the NYC surrounding area so I had very minimal travel costs.
Check the websites of the schools; the costs, as well as auditions requirements, dates, and locations, should be there.</p>
<p>With college application fee and audition fee, figure roughly $100 per school. You may be able to do all the auditions at Unified, which is what we did. But that meant traveling to Chicago, and staying there for 4-5 nights. We took the MegaBus, which we booked far enough in advance that it was really cheap, and booked our hotel in August to get a good deal. Still. the total cost for the trip was around $1,000, when you add in food and everything. Then you may get a campus callback --figure another $1k. Head shots, etc. You can easily spend several grand just to get all your applications and auditions done.</p>
<p>Wow. I feel very fortunate. We live in the midwest, and my S auditions last year were all within a 2 hrs drive (one of the locations had multiple schools there). I don’t recall paying any big fees. I think we spent maybe $100 on head shots. He got in his top choice. I suppose you’d have to travel more if you’re out west, where things are further apart.</p>
<p>My S just finished auditioning for acting programs. I seem to recall that the majority of the schools he applied to had an audition fee and the cost of the application plus the audition fee was running about $120 or so. One school was about $150 for application and audition fees. We travelled to NYC twice from another East Coast city (had to cancel the 3rd trip because of weather). The transportation costs were about $425 for 2 of us. He was able to do 7 auditions during unified auditions and 2 auditions the weekend before (5 nights in a hotel during unifieds and 2 nights the prior weekend). We rec’d a very good rate for those 2 weekends. However, NYC has hefty room taxes and so I paid about $1100 for the 7 nights. Plus - it sounds like you will be feeding a teenage boy like I had to. Best to look for a place that includes breakfast in the room rate because that will help keep him going through the a.m. auditions, will hold down costs, and you won’t have to leave the hotel and look for place for breakfast. I would say that the key thing in planning for auditions isn’t the cost but the huge organizational effort that goes into it. Quite frankly, it took a lot of work on my part helping my S organize the audition schedule. Your S needs to start watching the websites of the schools he is interested in as soon as he goes back to school in the fall. Some of the schools open their audition scheduling on their websites on October 1st. He should determine by next September which schools he is going to apply to, when/where their auditions will be held, and what their audition requirements are. It is very difficult to schedule more than two auditions per day - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Some schools will give you a set audition time - but they could be running late by 45 minutes or more. Other schools will request that you be there at a certain time, but the audition schedule isn’t posted until that day (in other words, your S may need to be there at 9:00 a.m. but not audition until 11:00 a.m.). We bought a calendar for 2010 in September and filled in the days that each school he was interested in was auditioning. It took quite a bit of time to make sure the audition schedule worked, especially for unifieds. In fact, I took off a day from work to arrange the majority of the auditions for him (tough for kids to do arrange auditions when they are in school all day). The sooner your S can schedule the auditions, the better especially if you want the dates that work for your schedule. I met one parent at an audition who told me that parents in her area actually pay private college counselors to make all the scheduling arrangements for acting auditions because of all the logistics involved. However, once we got to NYC the audition process went very smoothly because we had spent so much time organizing it. One other thing - some schools require the student to apply before they will schedule an audition. This means that the student may have to submit an application much earlier than the application deadline if he or she wants to be sure of getting a particular audition date. Other schools permit you to schedule an audition before actually applying (generally you will pay for the audition by credit card when you schedule it). Hope that his is helpful when you begin to navigate the process.</p>
<p>nansan-Your son is lucky to have you as a parent.
Good luck to your aspiring thespian.</p>