I am pondering this fall/ next winters auditions that my D , who is currently a junior , will be scheduling etc. I am having some concern about fitting numerous auditions in over those months… How many on campus auditions did , anyone who would like to comment, realistically take on? Yes I know we can take her to unifieds but a lot of schools she wants do not attend . Just wondering if 10-12 is possible really …wondering in general what numbers people have experience in doing. We wouldn’t really be going more then approx 8 or
9 hrs from home. Our friend did 7 on campus and I know logistically it was hard … Just wanting to hear some experiences etc from others.
My D only applied to 8 schools. She auditioned for all ON Campus. Due to the locations, we were able to combine two sets of two colleges as one weekend per set. These were Penn State and CMU on one weekend and Syracuse and Ithaca on one weekend. I don’t know your list but it may be possible to combine a couple schools on one trip. D’s audition dates spanned Dec. through March and it was doable. I think 10 or 11 would even have been doable. Of the 8 on campus auditions, we had already visited 4 of them prior to the audition trips, as well, 3 of which were in the same school year as the audition trips.
My D applied to 18 schools (a mix of MT and straight acting): one non-audition safety (UVM); Muhlenberg (only auditions for scholarships); she auditioned on campus for UConn, BU, NYU, CMU, Ithaca, Syracuse, Pace (twice - MT and Acting), Juilliard, Fordham, Marymount Manhattan. Then did Unifieds (or at least that same weekend) for Rutgers, Penn State, Point Park, Purchase, Michigan, Emerson. (NYU, Juilliard and Fordham were all the same week as Unifieds). (holy crap - it sounds insane when I type it now, lol!)
We live in the NY metro area so the furthest we traveled was Pittsburgh. It was manageable. I enjoyed our travels. The worst of this whole thing has been waiting for results this month. The scheduling of the auditions was a piece of cake compared to this. 
ETA: some of the schools she wants may not attend Unifieds but may schedule auditions in NY, LA or Chicago at different venues.
@soozievt I do hope to do two auditions in one time period if at all possible if the schools are close and we can work out the dates.
Wow @4gsmom that list is big and makes me feel better about it being possible lol
We scheduled 11 on campus auditions. As a parent I did no scheduling. We drove to all our auditions. Schedule early.
@Ducky312 do you mean your child scheduled the auditions themselves? Yes my D can do that but we have to consult my and my husbands work schedules obviously before setting them up etc …
We had an open dialog to work out logistics.
@theaterwork Don’t feel guilty if you are the one to do the audition scheduling. I handled all of that part of the process for my D… And 2 years later she still thanks me for it. She did all her own arrangements for MWTA’s and Strawhats this year- (and then all the changes when she opted out of Strawhats later on) which gave her a glimpse of what I did to help (travel arrangements, etc.) She says that there was no way she would have been able to manage all that scheduling on top of her crazy senior year schedule plus all the parts of the process she HAD to handle (all the apps, essays, and artistic stuff like prepping songs and monos.) She’s grown up a lot in her first two years at school!
Some kids are ready to handle the whole thing at that age… And have more time to devote to it than others. I’ve known kids who have done nearly the whole process solo - but mine would not have been successful. So, as with so many things in this process… It’s important to know your own child!
I considered myself my D’s administrative assistant. It was a lot easier for me to schedule her auditions because I knew the family schedule (we have 4 children.) To have her do it and then find out we couldn’t that weekend etc… would’ve been an exercise in frustration. She worked on her audition material, wrote her essays, researched her schools, met with coaches etc… I maintained the schedule and held her coat during auditions.
@4gsmom & @kategrizz I do think I am sorta considering myself the logistical person . She can do all the stuff to prepare, write essays /apps , SAT prep and update her resume & keep up her regular schoolwork and on an on as she already goes to an arts high school so regular shows going on all year too… And I will probably end up with scheduling and calendar keeping. My husband has a crazy schedule & he wants to go to at least some auditions with her so it will be hard enough to keep our heads above water the way it is! I consider myself to be an organized individual but I am thinking this is going to be one of my bigger challenges to date.
I’m not known for my organizational skills, but I had a notebook that I kept everything in. Each school had a different page and it had the passwords for the portals, what was required for the auditions, the dates etc… I swear if we’d had a house fire I would’ve saved the notebook first.
@4gsmom that is funny! I have a notebook now I started with school info and we are using that to start our narrowed down list by this summer. My D actually started writing notes on the schools in the spaces for each school and I was already like “don’t lose that notebook!” It already has so much info in it lol
I printed out a blank calendar and as soon as the audition dates (for the schools on D’s list) were announced, I wrote them all on the calendar. It helped me figure out scheduling.
D did all the scheduling, usually late in the night, with me sitting next to her at the dining room table, consulting the calendar. She did 9 auditions at Chicago Unifieds, two on campus, and two at Moonifieds.
If you plan to do a lot of on-campus auditions, it helps significantly to schedule at least 2 in the fall. This usually requires that your student start their applications in early September including getting video prescreens shot and submitted before October for those fall auditions (unless you are able to schedule schools in the fall that do not require a prescreen). To be ready for auditions in October or November means getting material (songs and monologues) selections done in the summer so that your student has at least a couple of months to practice prior to the first audition. It is also a good idea to work out the one minute dance audition that is required for many prescreens in the summer in order to be ready to shoot dance videos early in the fall if required.
Although dates and requirements can change from one year to the next, it is a good idea to start now to collect prescreen/audition requirements and dates from this past year for the schools that you are interested in so that you get a feel for what a possible schedule might look like. Then, in late August and early September, update your information base as schools publish their dates and requirements (some begin releasing information during the summer).
I think it is perfectly ok for parents to handle travel logistics and audition scheduling. As has been said, there are too many other factors involving all family members that must be considered when picking audition dates. I think it would be very tough for a student to try to do it independently. Besides, students have so many other things they have to do themselves (applications, essays, prescreens and audition prep) along with keeping up with school and every day life, If we can chip in and help with scheduling, I am all for it. Although kudos to any student who is able to handle all of these details on their own.
I also think it is helpful for you to keep all the passwords and details for each school where both you and your student can access it. You never know when they are going to need to access a portal! Or when they need to be reminded when or where they are to be.
Like @4gsmom - we kept a simple spiral notebook with dividers with a section for each school. We had all the login information for the school on the top of the first page, then wrote any other needed info in the notebook including dates things were submitted and how.
We likened our job to being an air traffic controller at times trying to handle all of the scheduling details. The more organized you can be, the better
I second what Emsdad says about schedule a few auditions early, say in November or December before the holidays. We managed to get four in, which netted two early acceptances. Took the pressure off a bit. But not totally LOL.
We did almost all of our auditions at the LA Unifieds. In fact, we ruled out a couple of schools because it just wasn’t practical to travel to them for auditions. The only on-campus audition we did was Pace, because they wanted a 4 hour time slot at Unifieds at there was no way that was going to work. I think we did 10 auditions at the Unifieds - 8 scheduled and 2 walk-ins.
Regarding the logistics, I did all the scheduling and travel arrangements, kept track of which songs and monologues he was doing for which auditions, and reminded him where he had to be when. There were even times I sent emails for him, although in those cases I was just doing the typing, I didn’t actually write the content - I just sent what he told me to send at times when he wasn’t near a computer to send them on his own.
Have an email address dedicated to only to school applications/audition scheduling. My son was fine with me having access to the email, though some kids would rather be in charge. I am a planner by nature and my son is not, so I did the heavy lifting in the scheduling and keeping track of what schools needed what, as well as the requirements for auditions. There was a point in the process when I showed my son and husband where all information could be found in case something untimely happened to me, lol.
Ditto what most of the posters say here. I was the scheduler/sherpa during audition season for my S. The tough part of scheduling the auditions (if you are doing on campus) is scheduling around your student’s school schedule (including rehearsal/performance schedules that tend to be really crazy with our kids). My S did most auditioning on campus. We definitely grouped auditions by city. We did a Boston trip and a NY trip where he got 5 auditions done (he did Ithaca at NY Unifieds since we scheduled other NY auditions at the same time); the balance were one-offs to which we drove. We are fairly centrally located (NE Ohio) so driving to BW, U Mich, CMU was not an issue.
My D, on the other hand, did all but one audition at Chicago Unifieds. Otterbein asks that Ohio residents audition on campus; the rest she did at Unifieds (CCPA on campus but while we were in Chicago). She managed her calendar for Chicago and managed to squeeze in some walk-ins.
For both, we used paper calendars to mark in known conflicts and to have a visual of how the season was coming together. We also needed to divide some of the chauffeuring duties between me and my husband - so we all relied on the paper calendar! It’s doable and our artistic students needed organizational assistance to get through the organizing and scheduling part of the process. Like @kategrizz, my S handled all his summer stock audition scheduling himself this year (coordinated rides/rooms with classmates).