An Early Start on MT College Applications = Easy Life.

For a musical theater kid, the summer before their senior year is not a fun one. There were many clashes with my daughter. I’ve been talking to parents and reading everyone’s woes for a while. So I had an idea of what needed to happen. But I didn’t know the half of it. I knew that we needed to get prescreens shot and submitted before November. Somehow I thought my kid had a handle on her material with her voice coach and a monologue coach she had been working with. I was mistaken. I had always let her handle her own stuff. But I saw that this was going far beyond her capacity. College applications for MT kids isn’t playtime. This shit is real.

I’ll get in to how we selected coaches and how we worked with them in another post. I’m going to suggest if your kid is serious, get help. Coaching will help your student and will maintain a more civil relationship between you and your student. Seriously. Stuff gets real, and quickly… tempers flare with the frustration. Have a buffer.

I suggest starting to look at material (monologues and songs) through your junior year. The schools generally keep the same audition requirements year to year. Prep to the current year, and then keep checking back. Ideally in my perfect world, I would have loved to had material selected by early spring of her junior year. That way, the summer before they start applying the material is being worked and polished. And then those prescreens can be shot before school starts. Because once senior year kicks off, the speed at which things start moving and the level of work is staggering.

College applications generally open online in August or early September. The most difficult and time consuming part are the essays. Most schools use the same essay questions year to year. So if your student wants to get them written during the summer, life will be so much easier. Each school asks something slightly different. But having a general idea, direction and dialogue as a framework helps a LOT. For Common App schools, check out the essays there. Other schools may have them online. The more you can get a jump on, the better.

For me, writing the paragraph above, I laugh. Getting my kid to be proactive over the summer was next to impossible. None of her friends are applying as MT majors, so their timelines were completely different. Most of them are just now, in November starting to jump into the process. Just the fact that I was pushing her to do things before what she thought was “the right time” created some crazy friction. Walk lightly, my friends. This is where having a coach as the buffer helps.

Since my kid was in rehearsals five days a week all summer, and she felt a lack of urgency to get this stuff done, our applications schedule was less than optimal. Learn from my mistakes. Be a ball buster. Polishing material, recording prescreens, writing essays and filling out college app all at once is STRESSFUL. Use the summer wisely. Shoot to have all your applications in by the middle of October, including prescreens submitted. This way you can participate in some of the early auditions.

In-person auditions start in November for many schools. If you can squeeze in a couple of the schools that are perhaps lower on your student’s list, so the pressure isn’t so awful, those are great test runs for those that really matter. There are also some great mock auditions you can sign up for.I’ll talk about that in the coaching post.

The biggest thing to be learned here: start early.