While there has been some active weeks, there’s never have been enough activity to justify so many sub categories. There’s a sort of Empty Restaurant Syndrome that happens when someone shows up in a category and the last real discussion was a week or two old. For most of the MT school subcategories, it’s more like several months (or years!) old. People assume they are in the wrong place or everyone has left.
Meanwhile, we also have a Musical Theater Major category, which is fairly active. If you want to know what’s going on with MT programs, your are much more likely to get an answer by posting there than in a school subcategory. So after considering the options, I’m going to move the posts in the Musical Theater Schools category to the Musical Theater Major category.
How is this going to happen?
I’ve started the process by tagging every post in the Musical Theater Schools subcategories with the name of the school. For instance, you can find all the posts about University of the Arts under the university-of-the-arts-mt tag. New threads can use that tag too if there are new questions about that (or any other) musical theater program.
In the next few days, we’ll be moving each thread from the individual school categories into the Musical Theater Major category. If you are interested in musical theater, that’s where you’ll want to watch for new threads.
When that’s done, I’ll archive this category and its subcategories.
If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in a reply or via private message. I know that this will be disruptive for some people, but I think it’s a necessary step for the long-term health of musical theater discussion on the site. Having so many categories that are nearly unused isn’t helping anyone right now.
I suggest CC change MT back to the way it used to be prior to the format update. It’s so hard to follow threads / content since that change was made sometime late 2020.
The way the individual school categories could have been improved would have been adjusting the former format such that you knew what had been read and what had not been read; those categories didn’t note what ground was viewed by the reader. That’s the only reason those categories were unusable.
This site is very hard to use now and it’s principally due to the format changes that have been made or ignored.
MT students have to be accepted twice - academically and artistically and they are two separate tracks at most schools. It is highly stressful and competitive. And there’s no uniform method of notification and often no published dates for artistic notifications. Some schools call, some email, some update their portal, some are still snail mail. Some are rolling, some are all on the same date. While there is a lot of variation, there are patterns for each school year in and year out. Every year there’s “has anyone heard from Michigan” and every year Michigan notifies around the same date, all at once, in the same way.
Everything mentioned by @DramaLlama18 applies to music and dance and maybe other disciplines as well. I think the needs of every major can be met in the majors forum without a separate long list of schools for any one discipline.
I respectfully disagree; it could become confusing because of similar subject matters but for distinct programs at the same school. Take for instance, whether dance classes are leveled and when leveling occurs; the answer to that could be very different for a dance major or a MT major.
The MT forum wasn’t broken, it just needed to add back functionality that had been removed (i.e. being able to tell whether a new topic had been added under a MT program of a specific school). Because this functionality was not added back, and instead they took out other aspects of the format that had helped make the forum work well, it’s rendered the MT forum much less effective.
Sorry I don’t understand your response. I am not going to go into a long debate here but with kids in several artistic/performance disciplines, I continue to be mystified as to why there is a separate long list of MT schools outside the majors forum. It would seem that that list of schools could go inside the MT majors forum. My last post on this.
Totally get your question and I think we can all agree that artistic programs within university/college programs (of all disciplines) are bizarre. My daughters’ two roommates at BoCo are dancers and she is MT. They applied to a different pool of schools, had different deadlines, different prescreen process at different departments in the school and a completely different journey even though the ended up at the same school, same conservatory in the same apartment. And schools themselves vary widely in what they offer for acting, MT, dance, theatre arts and music. Even schools within the narrow discipline of MT vary widely in their programs. So, this forum has historically been
VERY important to a VERY narrow segment of college applicants and no, I don’t believe it will be helpful at all to put them all together.
Given these consumer needs and CC’s well intentioned but misguided attempt to mainstream a process that is anything but mainstream, it’s quite possible that College Confidential is not the correct forum for these very specific conversations. Consumers will drift to Facebook Groups or other crowdsourced wiki that will be a better fit. @Twelfthman@CC_Jon
@CC_Jon I’m sure you have received a ton of complaints about the new format, so I’m not going to add to that right now. At this point, since usership is so down, you may want to look into combining the MT and Acting forums. There is a ton of cross over. A lot of MT students get redirected to Acting. A lot of kids will apply to both. If both pages were equally active, I’d say leave it separated, but now there’s so little info compared to year’s past, you’ll see duplicate posts in each section because people are looking for info anywhere they can get it. If you combined them, if people want to post something specific to MT or Acting, they can just state that. Anyway, that’s just my humble opinion.
