<p>Hey! How's everyone doing?</p>
<p>I hope you/your kids are loving the college experience so far. I know I am.
CalArts is everything I expected and more. The campus is beautiful and so is the weather. We only have a few buildings, but everyone works mainly on the Main Building. Which is nice, because that means there's art coming from every single room. The campus is far enough from LA so you can't go there every single day (which is good, cause you don't get distracted), but is also close enough so you can visit every weekend.</p>
<p>CalArts is a very small school (smaller than my high school!) with only 1440 students. That is good and bad at the same time. Good because in two weeks you pretty much know everyone's faces (you accidentally make eye contact while going somewhere a couple of times and then you end up talking to the person) and because all the teachers know you. Bad for the same reason. You can't "escape" if you want to.</p>
<p>The teachers are amazing and each student has their own mentor: a teacher that will help you with everything you need, including picking electives, etc. Acting students need to take four classes: acting (studio), tai chi, yoga/movement and voice. If you're a first year and you don't have AP English or other transferrable credits, you need to take Critical Writing and the Arts (gen ed). Also, all the BFA 1 students need to do Run Crew (Freshmen can't audition).</p>
<p>Our general education classes (called Critical Studies) are insane. We have everything from Pornography & Sex Writing and Cross Cultural Look at Death, to Black Poetry and Contemporary Literature. You need 46 CS credits to graduate, which means that is very hard for a BFA 1 to get into the class we want, because BFA 3 and 4s have priority (most people wait until the last minute to take these classes, usually because they're busy with their projects). But that's not a problem for me, because they have the same classes every year or so.</p>
<p>Registration is done in person, which can be a little crazy for some people (especially if you don't get there early). Lots of waiting. But they say it's because it's so much better to get to know your instructors in person before you sign up for their class. And I agree. We do have an add/drop period, though. And Acting students have most of their classes pre-assigned.</p>
<p>This year they accepted 42 Acting students. I was impressed, I thought there would be less people. But they say that lots of actors drop out even before the semester ends because it is a super intense program (we had one guy drop out last week already). And indeed, the second year class is already half the size of my class. We were divided into three studios with 14 people each, 7 boys and 7 girls. The first year studio teachers are Nataki Garrett (director and Co-Head of the Acting Program) and Andrea LeBlanc (actor). They're both amazing, strong women. They pick the studios very very carefully, so that the ensemble is balanced. That means they can also switch people around at any time. We have lots of international students, especially in the acting program (Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Hong Kong, Turkey, UK, etc.) and lots of older/transfer students as well.</p>
<p>The dorms are quite big at Chouinard Hall and Americans tell me the food is way better than in other colleges, but because I absolutely hate this fast-food/fried stuff/weird rice North American diet, I cook my own food.</p>
<p>The perks of being a CalArtian are many: huge library, huge film library, Commons time (a time when no one has classes, so we can work on projects with people from other m</p>