<p>Daughter, mom, and dad attended the Fall Preview yesterday at Smith.</p>
<p>Everything was wonderful from start to finish. The campus is beautiful, the students friendly, and the faculty and staff helpful.</p>
<p>We heard from a panel of three faculty members, including, quite conveniently, one from the English Department, my daughter's likely major.</p>
<p>She got to chat with the head of the Theatre Department(her minor or second major)...very friendly and enthusiastic.</p>
<p>We saw a couple of the houses and were impressed.</p>
<p>We took a tour of the theatre complex...very nice indeed.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, along with cookies and hot chocolate, we were serenaded by the Smithereens, one of the school's many a capella groups(another of my daughter's interests).</p>
<p>Overall we were very pleased with our day(great weather by the way) and are definitely sold on Smith as one of d's top choices.</p>
<p>I think the theater building was really what sold me on Smith, which is funny because I didn’t actually end up doing very much theater there at all. But Theater 14, and the black box, and oh lordy, the Set Production room. I took one look at the paint frame and the fly space and I was like: “Done. Where do I sign?”</p>
<p>Heck. Neither D were pretty impressed with the whole Sage complex or whatever it’s called and she wasn’t remotely a Theater major.</p>
<p>As a rare on-stage performer myself, I kinda drooled at the facilities. Colleges often have better facilities than municipal or commercial enterprises do.</p>
<p>Dad if the Tactical Admission Squad comes up with an acceptance and some nice financial aid we’re in.</p>
<p>Agree with you both on the theatre facilities. Very professional set-up. The guy who took us around was Art Director on the “Sex and the City” movie and several other major projects. Very friendly and helpful.</p>
<p>I would be more than pleased if d matriculates in NoHo.</p>
<p>It’s a great theatre, I love that building; the only thing is, it doesn’t seem to have changed since I majored in theatre there, 25 years ago. I mean, even the colors are the same, and the carpet. I felt like I was in a time warp when I walked in, which was great for me, but somewhat odd, considering how very much almost every other facility (except Seelye) has changed. (And somebody needs to do something about the courtyard, but then, that’s the same too–and it’s also odd, considering how well-cared for the plantings are in the rest of campus, that these are weedy, overgrown, and dried-out.)
The theatre department is fantastic; great people, great classes. My D’s roommate is a musical theatre major now, and she’s quite happy there, and planning to take a term at the Eugene O’Neill center Junior year.</p>
<p>It was a combination of the music/dance library, and the STRIDE promise of a research assistantship working on the first opera ever written by a woman that sold my d. And, yes, the music library was my D’s second home, and, yes, she prepared the working score of the opera (becoming fluent in Italian along the way), and parlayed it into a major graduate fellowship at Princeton.</p>
<p>B51, good luck with the nice FinAid. That’s truly the imponderable. You can calculate the broad brushstroke easily…it’s the fine brushstrokes and the merit aid that are imponderables. Plus, if either spouse is self-employed, how they choose to interpret certain aspects of the Schedule C.</p>