Teacher Assignment with Acceptance?

Starting a new thread here so that people can prepare themselves for the impending chaos and nail-biting suspense: Which schools notify teacher assignments WITH the acceptance letter, and which schools stay deliberately vague until the night before deposits are due? Any historical anecdotes welcome.

We found that this seemed to vary greatly depending on instrument, but as far as violins go, this is what happened for my D: CIM told my D her acceptance, teacher assignment and scholarship all in the same e-mail. NEC and Juilliard both sent acceptance emails. Then in the next day or two we got financial information. THEN we waited forever for teacher assignments. Juilliard sent the teacher decision (she got her number 1 choice) about a week or less before May 1 deadline and NEC’s #1 choice teacher was in email communication with my D until the 28th of April because this teacher was trying to find a way to fit her in. It was well worth the wait! But the stress was intense!

For Violin performance again (2018), CIM, USC, UCLA, Peabody [& Boulder, Chapman] all had studio assignments as part of the acceptance (maybe a day or two after the acceptance notification). At USC, the assignment was to a 3rd or 4th choice, while the #1 prof made room for S in the studio - came through finally in late April, about a week before the deadline.

IU, BU, CMU did not assign a studio - I believe they wait for an acceptance before the assignment.

I hope people have thought through their studio preferences : Empirically (with a statistically insignificant sample of 1) it seems that if you don’t get your 1st choice studio (at schools that ask for a pref-list), there is a chance of rejection from the school (I believe this happened at NEC).

So if you don’t get your first choice, you are rejected, then if you’re accepted, why wouldn’t they tell you that you were assigned to your first choice straightaway?

I believe they attempt to assign you the studio if you’re accepted (most schools on my S’s list did). I believe IU and some others wait until an acceptance before assigning a studio.

When my daughter was accepted to IU she returned to Bloomington have some trial lessons with teachers. She also had trial lessons with IU teachers in NY and DC (when they were on tour.) She eventually got her first choice studio there, but ended up at a different conservatory. Good thing, because that IU teacher left for a different conservatory two years into her undergrad degree. That’s an unknowable variable you can’t control for–and a reason to make sure you like the school as well as the teacher. Alternately, you can follow your teacher if s/he leaves for a different faculty position, although admission to the next conservatory isn’t necessarily guaranteed.

And another experience… while IU is known for not giving teacher assignments, my D did get a studio offer from a teacher after her audition and prior to her acceptance letter (it was early Feb). I know many students that accepted without assignments…some had an idea about the teacher they would get, others no idea. At the grad level I believe more students have “understandings” with teachers. If not, the head of the voice dept was very good, from my understanding, of getting the right student with the right teacher. I can only speak to the voice dept.

While schools often have known behavior, there are always exceptions (as @glassharmonica notes too). At IU some students do get studio offers (more to do with the teacher’s/depts MO than talent, I believe). In my D’s case, it came direct from the teacher…not in an official letter. If there were no offers, I would assume that’s typical at IU and then just work with the school to get to a comfortable place on a teacher…or go elsewhere.

And yes teachers leave, get sick etc, so it is important to like the school and feel that you could work with other teachers if need be. My D’s teacher was out for semester due to back surgery. Her replacement teacher worked out very well in the end.

I should have mentioned that the teachers my daughter was interested in studying with at IU were not at her audition (it was the January audition.) Hence, the scrambling around. She was told by the admin that she would be “assigned” a teacher at the start of the academic year, but of course she was looking for a good fit well in advance. As far as we could tell, in her peer group, it was common to make these informal studio arrangements.

@Music2023 In our experience acceptance to the school was separate from acceptance into the studio of your choice. NEC included. That’s why they ask for 1st 2nd and 3rd choice. So, you are fully accepted into the school and given financial awards as well but the teacher is decided by the individual departments. So it is wise to always be sure of the 2nd and 3rd teacher choice (or at least that you can live with it). Then, it becomes a choice for the student, putting the puzzle pieces together - which teacher at which school and what combo is the best.

This was a very interesting email from the admissions office we got while waiting that gave great insight to the whole process.

“Each year 120+ violin applicants list [teacher] as first preference, 50-60 of whom are typically invited for live auditions. We actually admitted 37 violinists this year who requested [teacher] first, but with only 3 openings, the vast majority were passed along to other NEC faculty members right away. Only 7, including [my D], were kept on a short list for the openings. [Teacher] then offers out spots slowly; she never wants to over-commit herself. [Teacher] and I have been checking in almost daily for the last three weeks to discuss how the situation is developing, and [my D] is always on our minds! We will absolutely provide information as soon as we can.”

Hmm so that sounds like it might be the MO for the highly sought out teachers. They are waiting to see who gets into Curtis and says no to them. And if one of their students gets an orchestra job and leaves.

Sounds like a game of musical chairs… (pun unintended). Must be quite stressful for the teachers and the admissions folk too since they know not all admitted students will accept and yet they don’t know how many will and hence this back and forth game… Lucky for us we have to go through it just once whereas they do it over and over each year so my appreciation goes out to all of them.

Yikes – there is so much that I don’t know! S is a jazz guitarist. He is just looking for admission into a jazz studies program. He has not been at all focused on the teachers. In fact, he applied ED to Northwestern’s Bienen, and they don’t even have a full time guitar teacher on staff. He didn’t get in there (probably just as well) and, with the exception of USC which did ask him for his teacher preferences (he simply chose the two teachers he met when he visited campus), he has not been focused on who his teacher may be. Any advice on how he should approach this from here on out? He has 3 auditions lined up (Michigan, USC, UCLA) and is waiting on prescreening results from 3 others (NYU, New School, Peabody).

@lkbux64 please look for some earlier threads on trial lessons. At least for the schools you might be close by it makes a lot of sense to see if your S can have trial lessons with the prospective teachers.

This creates an opportunity to see if the teacher / student chemistry is likely to be there. Its probably not possible to fully determine good fit in the span of a trial lesson lasting less than an hour but it is still better than nothing. If all else fails your S could also try to friend some current students of the teacher on social media and try to see if they may be willing to give your S input on their experiences. All the best!

Taking the advice on this thread, my S did reach out for trial lessons to guitar teachers at the 3 schools for which he has upcoming auditions. One of them is not a full time faculty member, but travels to the school once every week or two to give lessons to the guitar students enrolled in the jazz studies program at that school. He told my S that he does not have time to see him on campus, but offered S the opportunity to travel to the teacher’s house (approximately 2 hours away from campus) for a lesson. That struck me as a bit odd, but I am trying to keep an open mind about it. Has anyone else had an issue like this arise?

As a non-musical parent of a VP applicant, I found the teacher selection issue to be a fascinating part of the process, and the most opaque. S18 had trial lessons at all four of the schools he was considering in the end. The USC-Thornton professor who had given S18 a trial lesson emailed an offer to join his studio about the same time we received the admissions offer. The VP dept head at Miami-Frost talked to S18 and they discussed placement shortly after admissions notification, which was followed up by an email from the teacher. FSU was going to assign S18 to a teacher when he matriculated, but S18 had a particular teacher in mind and so went there for a trial lesson and then emailed him until he extracted a commitment. Only then did S18 accept at FSU. In the meantime, we were trying to research the teachers and talk to current and past students to learn as much as we could.

@lkbux64 : This happened to my S, the professor only came to campus a couple of times a week and the day we visited was not his “in” day. So we visited him at the teachers home studio. S is now studying with the professor.
I dont think you have anything to worry about. Profs sometimes do this when they have to make up lessons as well.

@ikbux64, the adjunct faculty member offering a lesson at a location other than campus does not strike me as odd at all. The teacher may not even have a studio space available for hours other than those he actually teaches students already enrolled at the college. Even for full time faculty, it is not unusual to have “trial” lessons off campus as the teacher’s schedule requires. (teacher’s home, hotel rooms or convenient space when teacher is traveling off campus, a different campus where the teacher also is on faculty, etc)

cross-post with above!

@lkbux64 Well…a lot of private teachers teach out of their homes. If he can’t be on campus at the same time, it doesn’t seem odd to me. He may teach at the school and out of his house (for private lessons). On a few occasions my D took private lessons with other teachers at her schools (for a part study…she had soprano teachers so she met with a mezzo teachers who had sung the parts to go over them…at their homes). I know that she did diction study with an Italian woman at her home…and it was paid for by the school. So…nope not odd.

I see others have answered too…

Thanks @gram22, @Momofadult and @bridgenail. I am glad I asked!