<p>Hello, MT thread community. I have been lurking and reading (and reading and reading) the archived drama school threads for a while now and have just started on the MT threads. There is weeks of reading to do here - and I can get through Gone With The Wind in two days, so even a fast reader has a job to do. I am so grateful to have found such a resource though and thanks in advance for the help.</p>
<p>My d is going into her senior year - is a theater monkey. Many things are still undecided. BA then on to MFA vs BFA, and mt or a more general theater major for starters. Those questions will probably be answered by where she ends up going, because getting in and especially being able to afford it are definitely going to limit her options. In particular, being able to afford it. We make too much money to get a dime from the feds except for loans, and I am vehemently against her taking loans because I firmly believe if she has to start paying them off right away, she could end up with some ordinary old job type job and then end up doing that the rest of her life, because one thing leads to another; you get lulled into the security, or just trapped. If she is loan free, she can take a lot more risks as far as what she wants to try to do, as she will only have to figure out how to keep a roof over her head and eat while she is waiting for her big break. lol. As if that isn't hard enough. But a big old loan too - I just am really against it.</p>
<p>However of course we don't have anywhere close to enough money to fund a private school. In fact even the pricier state schools are going to be a stretch for us if she doesn't bring in some good scholarships or grants.</p>
<p>Sadly, like many fine arts type kids, her academics are not in the top one or two percent. </p>
<p>Goes to a large suburban high school - overall good school; not a famous prep school, nothing special, does have good academic choices and AP/Dual Credit choices. </p>
<p>Drama department is, shall we say, in the midst of building itself back up again. Help there has been sporadic and most of her stage experience so far has been in community theater - where she has had a couple nice roles, was Liesl in SOM and Chava in Fiddler as well as a few smaller roles. :-)</p>
<p>She took the PSAT and did well but not well enough to be a National Merit Scholar.
Her grade point average is 3.62, unweighted. I have no idea what it is weighted, because our high school advising department employs the most singularly uninterested, unknowledgable, and unhelpful people I have ever seen and they do not understand what I mean when I ask "so what is my daughter's weighted GPA on a 4 point scale?" I get some mumblings about a 91. The more questions I ask the less helpful the answers seem to get. So we are on our own, baby.</p>
<p>She was in the top 8% but had a rough year and is only in the top 13% now, though she swears she'll bring that back up in this upcoming 7th semester. She is currently 53 out of 445 students.</p>
<p>She has taken DC Spanish, and is planning on DC English, Algebra, and Sociology this fall. All of these DC classes will transfer to any Texas state school. Generally they are pointless as far the private schools go, so if goes to one, it will have been money wasted. But if she goes to a state school, she could get pretty much an entire semester of general ed credits out of the way. Totally playing craps here, no way to know if it will pay off or not yet.</p>
<p>SAT is not very good; she trained for ACT which is what most midwestern states take and she did better at that, but because she is weak in math and science only has a 28. (her reading is a 32 and writing a 31, though!) We have time for her to retake it once and hopefully bring up her science and raise her composite.</p>
<p>SAT is 1760 out of 2400. Has only taken it once.</p>
<p>She has been dancing since age 4 at a studio whose emphasis is on actual dance as opposed to gymnastics, "dance teams" or cheerleading or other peripheral areas of interest. She has been en pointe for 7 years now :-) and has been in the community ballet Christmas show (usually Nutcracker) several times though she is too busy to do it every year. This is an auditioned show btw. She takes jazz, tap, and Spanish.</p>
<p>She has a trainable voice that needs a lot more training. lol. It's very pretty, and she has a good range (a comfortable 3 octaves) and a pretty good ear, good sense of rhythm (yay for tap lessons!) but needs to work a lot on getting the instrument in good shape. Breath control, where to "put" the note, etc. She has a wonderful voice coach who has improved her vastly the past couple years.</p>
<p>She is a good actress - made everyone cry as Chava - she has "sparkle" on stage, people tell me. </p>
<p>So that is what we have to work with.</p>
<p>Reach or dream schools are no problem figuring out which ones she likes. Big out of state State schools are no problem figuring out which ones she likes. Our issue is safety schools and by safety I mean also financial safety. We need some of those because I am afraid what will happen is that after applications and everything come back, what will happen is she'll probably get accepted to at least a couple but they won't offer enough money that we can comfortably (or at all, really) send her without taking out WAY more loans than she should. Like, we'll have a gap of 24,000 a year or so after scraping up everything we can, and there is NO WAY IN HELL I can personally support a decision for a theater arts or liberal arts major to go out into the world with an undergrad degree and so much as a dime over 20,000 of debt - at the max maybe 30,000. If she were going into petrochemical engineering, or if we were talking about medical school, yeah, sure, but I have unhappy first hand experience with the folly of taking on a debt load that is out of line with the reasonable expectations of the earning potential of that field.</p>
<p>So if she got into Oklahoma City or Oberlin (two of her top choices) but they left too much of a gap for her to go, we are pretty much looking at state schools. </p>
<p>My brother is insisting that UT is the most pedigreed school out there and I have objections to it.</p>
<p>Nobody has probably ever heard of Stephen F Austin, I bet. We went there and it has a lovely theater department actually. Many productions during the year, and a wonderful internship program with five different regional choices including Guthrie, or a European theater experience in London and Madrid or Estonia, that is their entire junior or senior year if they do a BFA. </p>
<p>There is also San Marcos (Texas State University) which has a well developed program.</p>
<p>SMU would be great but it's private and would need to give her a bunch of money. As you can see with her stats, she's not gonna be like Thesbohemian and blow them away with her academics; I have no idea how she will fare at auditions. She's good but so are sooooo many others.</p>
<p>Her drama teacher has never even mentioned (that I know of) Unifieds. She does take her seniors to TETA, and D will be going to that. We don't even have a monolog picked out yet! Gotta get to work!</p>
<p>Sorry so long - what is my question? It is, considering her ability and stats, and our financial restrictions, and our utter lack of any outside help, what schools should we really look at as far as fit/safety, and is there something I might not be aware of in the application/audition process, for a girl in her position?</p>
<p>Does that make any sense? :-) She's very sparkley and outgoing and oh yes. Also she has a very strong costuming talent. She won first place this year (YES!<em>victory dance</em>) in the state at UIL - theater costume design this year (Antigone! which she set in 19th century India!) and last year was a finalist. So she wants to split her concentration between performance and tech/costuming. So...any advice on that one also?</p>
<p>sorry so long. :-(</p>
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