<p>Yes this is pathetic, but i need to get an idea of whether i can or can’t get into Tisch undergrad for film and television production. I am currently a Junior in high school in a prominently upper class and Jewish town in New Jersey. My father owns a real estate company and graduated from George Washington University while my mother is a dentist who graduated from Rutgers undergrad and NYU dental. I find my personal resume to be very weak in regards to the arts. Freshman year i achieved a disgusting 2.69 GPA (4.0 scale) with a fair share of honors classes. I brought things up a bit sophomore year with a 3.5 and continued with my trend in honors classes as well as AP US history. Junior year is where i have found my success while i’m bound to finish with a 4.3 and with APUS, AP Human Geography, and AP Photography. I expect to get fives on all of the AP tests. Senior year i also plan on loading myself with 4 AP classes: Government and Politics, Art History, Digital Imaging, and European History. As of now my SAT is relatively strong but i plan to finish it off with a score anywhere between a 2100 and a 2220. I plan on taking the US history and Math II Sat 2s and expect to get over a 700 on each of them. This year i am working at my temple as a shadow and teacher of special needs students and will also be a counselor at a sleep away camp where i will specialize in teaching digital photo and video effects. Artistically, on the other hand, my resume is relatively weak. Sure I’ve taken 3 years of photo in high school but outside of that i lack any true experience behind the camera. I am very skilled in just about every editing and visual effects program you could name (do i put that on my resume?) and i do plenty of work on my own, but never really worked in the business. Besides that i plan to devise a truly phenomenal and brilliant entrance portfolio, potentially the best the administration office has ever seen. With such high expectations, i am getting recommendations from my photography and English teachers and plan on writing an above average essay. I have around 70 hours of community service yet the only club i am a member of is Key Club. Yes i know this is pretty vague resume, but please tell me anything it lacks and anything i could do to improve it and help my chances of getting in. Besides my drastically increasing GPA, my academics are rather average and i hope my genuine skill in film will put me through, but is the portfolio that significant? Thanks a bunch for any responses and i’d be happy to answer any questions you have in order to give you a better idea of my eligibility. </p>
<p>p.s. i plan on applying early decision in 2013</p>
<p>Second, nobody here can tell you if you can get into Tisch! I’m a college counselor and I could not even make such an assessment of your odds based on what you wrote here. For one thing, going by the GPA you “expect” to achieve and the SATs and SAT Subject Test scores and AP scores you “expect” and the “best essays” and “best portfolio” is rather, um, well, meaningless, sorry. </p>
<p>Some very general suggestions are to get the best grades you can. Take the most demanding curriculum you can muster at your high school. Prep for standardized tests. </p>
<p>Your extracurriculars as you explain them do not stand out. Applicants to highly selective programs are going to have leadership and/or substantial extracurricular achievements. </p>
<p>For film, some kids will have already produced some short films. I suggest you look into that as independent study projects or some such. They may have entered arts contests and won substantial awards. They may have done internships in the field (remember that just doing photography is not the same as shooting film). Some may have started a video business. Some may have attended a summer film program.</p>
<p>At Tisch, yes, the portfolio will matter a LOT. Academics also matter. It is one of the hardest film schools to get into and you’ll be competing against kids who have achieved a great deal. You need to talk to current students and people in the field to figure out what you need to do now to position yourself as a competitive candidate. Further, while you should dream high for Tisch, you need to not focus on one particular college and look into a wide range of really good colleges for film. In any case, check out the film majors forum here and read lots of threads and ask good questions there (not asking “what are my chances?”!!). </p>
<p>I’ve had a few students be accepted to Tisch for film, and I agree with what Soozie has written, with one exception: while the writing requirement for the program is rigorous and film-oriented, you CAN indeed submit photographs for the visual part of your portfolio, and they will be seriously considered. Visual story-telling is key. In the past, the images were required to be hand-printed, reflecting your mastery of craft as well as vision, but it looks like that’s no longer the case. Everyone I’ve worked with who attended this program had extraordinarily high grades and test scores and had put a lot of time into their craft–not that it was necessarily reflected in a resume per se. Good luck, and do look at a variety of programs!</p>
<p>Yes, I did not mean to imply that photographs could not be in the portfolio! All sorts of things can be in the artistic portfolio for Tisch!! </p>
<p>I was just saying that some kids who plan to pursue film production in college have already created an independent film project. I was suggesting to start dabbling in film besides photography.</p>
<p>Yep, I see what you mean when I look at your post. And I expect they’re seeing more and more kids with deep experience in actual video production (and probably some “real” film as well). It’s such a rapidly evolving field, and there’s so much to know–the technical side is always expanding–it’s gotta be tough for them to figure out which kids have both the visual strengths and the story-telling ability, not to mention the devotion to craft. All of my students who’ve gone into film have started taking summer classes or workshops in high school, and several have done internships–you’re right, that kind of stuff is crucial and probably becoming more so each year! Makes you think that the theater admissions process isn’t all that bad after all…</p>