<p>PLEASE Help! My daughter is graduating a year early from High School. She is not a genius or anything, she is about a B average student and has a few C's on her transcript. She attends a good school that is a Charter School that is focused on College Prep. She has taken Extra classes to graduate early because we are moving back to Michigan this summer, but she wanted her diploma from California where we live now. </p>
<p>Anyway, she is still very naive and has a pretty dependent personality. She says she wants to go to college for acting/theater but most of them require auditions and she doesn't have much experience. I was kind of thinking that if she took a year off to take some acting classes and maybe try out for some local plays, work part time, and take drivers training (she hasn't yet) that it might help prepare her better for life on her own in college. </p>
<p>Can anyone tell me if taking a year off would hurt her when she decides to go to college? Will they not want to accept her because she was out of school so long? Also we do not have a lot of money to pay for school so most of it will have to be financial aid and scholarships when she does decide to go. Any knowledge or information on this matter would help me a lot!! Thank you</p>
<p>The year off, if spent maturing and readying herself (such as for auditions) is not a negative. What you should direct her to do before leaving CA is to get her rec letters in line and written from her teachers. Come Nov 2013, I think it would be very difficult for her to request teacher rec letters since she would have been gone for many months.</p>
<p>T26E4’s answer is right on the money. I will add that when my daughter graduated early, she called around to several admissions offices to ask if she should apply that year and then defer, because she did not intend to go directly to college, they all told her to wait. They said that they would not be likely to admit her at seventeen, because they would be concerned about her level of maturity. I think it is likely only to benefit your daughter to wait a year.</p>
<p>Take a year off and start practicing. Get all the paperwork done now. I know athletes who take a year off to get stronger and better to play college ball.</p>
<p>A gap year can be an excellent idea. If you do a web search, you can find more info. Stay away from companies trying to sell you gap-year packages, though.</p>
<p>In terms of college apps, keep in mind that a “gap year” gives much less than a year of experience so she might want to start lining things up in the spring so that she starts as soon as school is out. If she graduates in June 2013, then auditions for programs to enter in Sept 2014 will be in early 2014, about 6 months after she graduates HS.</p>
<p>Definitely a gap year can be a positive, and colleges will honor that. However she has to do a gap year program, volunteer, get a job, travel abroad, or do some other thing that betters her as a person, not just sit around home. If they see she did nothing, and she was just chilling all year, it won’t look good. If she was a full-time volunteer at the Red Cross, for example, it’d look great!</p>
<p>If she has so little acting experience, you both should read the thread for theater majors on this site. She’ll be competing with students who have been acting since they were in grade school. She still could succeed but needs to start now and may need more than one gap year.</p>
<p>Crimsonstained7 Thanks for the reply, and we will definitely make sure she is not just sitting around! She does lots of volunteering now as well because I know it looks good on an application.</p>
<p>My first thought: Keep her out of college until she decides to pursue a more useful major (she can still audition & act as an EC). Many well known actors have commented that they found acting classes to be a waste of time–not voice lessons, however.</p>
Dance, too. Lots of actors who struggle do so in part because they can’t dance a lick.</p>
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<p>I don’t mean to gainsay anouilh’s advice, and I hope nobody sees the following comment that way, but I think this advice probably applies only to students who are graduating from high school early. For students who are graduating on time, most people recommend applying to college during the twelfth grade and then deferring enrollment. It can be difficult, as T26E4 said, to manage the logistics of recommendation letters, transcripts, etc., after graduation–especially for a student who moves away from the area or who spends his or her gap year abroad. It is much easier to take care of all those administrative details when one is in the same building a the teachers, the registrar, et al., five days a week.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for all of your responses, I feel so much better now! I did have one more question though. What do you think about her taking 1 or 2 classes a semester at a community college during her year off? They offer some acting classes that I thought might help her prepare for an audition at a bigger college. Do you think that will affect her applying at a bigger school the following year?</p>
<p>There are some colleges and universities where having taken community college classes after graduation makes one a transfer applicant and not an applicant for freshman admission. I don’t know whether that makes a whole lot of difference in BFA programs; you’d probably be well advised to ask in the specialty forum for theatre majors.</p>
<p>If taking some community college classes in theatre, voice and dance wouldn’t interfere with admission to BFA programs later on, it’s probably a very good idea.</p>
This is an important point, since the OP daughter is graduating from HS in CA and might be interested in the acting program at some UC schools. UC schools will consider you a transfer student if you take any college classes except in the summer immediately following HS graduation. Same is true with the CSU campuses.</p>
<p>As Sikorsky says, you need to check with each individual school for their definition of a fr and transfer applicant, it can range from 1 post-HS college class to less than a full year of college coursework. </p>
<p>While need based FA and merit scholarships also vary by school, the vast majority of merit aid goes to fr admits, and many schools have less FA available to transfers. In addition, some schools that are need-blind for fr, have need-aware admissions for transfers.</p>