When I was a high school teacher, I always tried to support my students in their extra-curricular activities. While this frequently meant attending sporting events, it also meant going to concerts, plays, and a variety of other events. As an athlete in high school and college, I also sang and managed to find time to act in two plays, so I’ve come to appreciate the tremendous effort that students who don’t do sports put in. Thus, although my last post was about athletic recruits, I realize that there are large numbers of students for whom none of what I wrote applies. Fear not! If you’re an artist, musician, actor, or even a chef, I have some suggestions for you too!
Cooking
I’ll start with my personal favorite, the CIA. No, not the American spy agency, but rather the Culinary Institute of America. Early in my teaching career, I had a student who came to me for college advice. When I asked her what she was interested in, she mentioned that she was a major foodie, and I told her about the CIA. Amazingly, she ended up applying, and is now a very successful sous chef at Maialino, one of the best Italian Restaurants in Manhattan!
A dinner dish by Maialino.
There are, of course, lots of other culinary schools, but for my money, the CIA is the best in the United States. It also has a partnership with Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, so that a student not only gets culinary training, but learns the business skills necessary to run a restaurant. A word to the wise: culinary school is not for the casual cook but for students who have a true passion for food and a tremendous work ethic. Admission is much like a regular college application, and actually slightly less rigorous in terms of grades, but I can just about guarantee that four years of culinary school will require a great deal more elbow grease than just about anything else you can study in college.
Artwork (Including Design and Photography)
I am, most definitely, not an artist. I actually remember being forced to color in first grade and objecting that it was a waste of my time. That is not to say that I don’t appreciate good art, but that I knew, from a young age, that I was never going to create it. However, I’ve worked with several students with a great deal of artistic talent.
2018 Alps Dolomites by Tracy + David.
I think that the most difficult part of the process of applying to art school is convincing parents.
Yes, you have to put in a huge amount of effort working on your portfolio, but unlike culinary school, art school does not guarantee paid work at the end, something that generally concerns parents when they consider tuition. I have a friend, Tracy Boulion, who graduated from the Tisch School at New York University, one of the best arts programs in the country, and although she and her husband run a very nice photography business now, making ends meet after graduation was, I imagine, more difficult.
While talking about photography, it would be a sin not to mention photojournalism, where Tracy started her career. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to chat with (and be photographed by) Jessica Rinaldi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Boston Globe. Although she demurred (SAT word!) about being called an artist, anyone who’s seen her Life and Times of Strider Wolf can’t help but be moved, and it certainly fits my criterion for “art.” She attended Boston University, and admitted that her parents were deeply skeptical about her decision to pursue a degree in journalism. After all, the newspaper industry keeps contracting and jobs are therefore increasingly scarce. However, like Ali Fenwick (another friend of mine), who graduated from Columbia University’s famed journalism school and now works at Sports Illustrated, Ms. Rinaldi’s tremendous success demonstrates that people with talent will always be able to find a way to make a living. As she told me, as much as journalists often complain about their industry, they can’t imagine doing anything else.
Power by Mindy Ma.
If you are worried about choosing art as a career, there are ways to hone your artistic talents in higher-demand areas.
The most obvious is in the tech area; companies need people who can design websites that are more than merely functional, and are willing to pay a good deal of money for attractive designs. Along the same lines, I have a student currently studying gaming design at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, combining his creative abilities with his computer skills. And, there is a growing market for computer animation, requiring top of the line skills in graphic design.
At the same time, if cartoons and computers aren’t necessarily your thing, you can take the route of Mindy Ma, one of the most talented students I’ve ever had the pleasure to help. She was, and is, an artist. Perhaps the most creative and artistically gifted student I’ve ever known. But, she had that parent problem; she got into lots of top art schools, including the Pratt Institute, UCLA, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and but both she and her parents were worried about future earnings. Thus, she used her prodigious skills, and her talent in mathematics, and also applied to architecture programs. She got into most of the top programs in the United States, including Rice, Syracuse, and USC, but eventually decided to pursue a degree in architecture, with minors in business and fine arts, at the University of Pennsylvania. She is living proof, I think, that a great artist does not have to starve in order to create beauty.
Performing Arts (Including Acting, Dancing, and Music)
Actors, I think, have similar trouble to artists, with more options for education but perhaps fewer other outlets for their creativity. I think of Hugh Bonneville’s character in Notting Hill, who doesn’t recognize Julia Roberts as a famous actress and talks about what a difficult life actors must have, “scraping by on seven, eight thousand a year,” and then asks her how much she was paid for her last film. Realistically, most actors are more the scraping by types than the Julia Roberts types, so that for every Benedict Cumberbatch, there are dozens of non-credited extras, and hundreds of would-be actors who don’t even get as far as being an extra. And yet, at the same time, if your passion is for the theater, there is no business like show business.
West Side Story at 5th Avenue Theatre (photo by Dan Lusardi).
Dan Lusardi, one former student, a very talented actor, singer, and dancer, was accepted to the Musical Theatre program at Elon University. To give you some idea of the competitiveness of this program, their acceptance rate last year was 2.5%, lower than any university in the United States. But Elon, and a few other schools, truly prepare students for a career in the theater so that Dan has had steady work ever since he graduated. I fully expect to see him on Broadway sometime soon, but he is just finished up a production of West Side Story at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre and is about to start Oklahoma! at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont.
In this same vein, I want to include the story of one young man at my own alma mater, Fordham University, who had never acted before, but needed an extra credit his sophomore year and signed up for an acting class. Next thing he knew, he was being cast as a lead in a college play, where he was discovered and cast in a few television shows before making it to the big screen, and eventually winning several Golden Globes and Oscars. His name? Denzel Washington. In other words, under the right circumstances, one can make it as an actor, singer, or dancer, and a good college theater program can help tremendously.
An organ by The Noack Organ Company (made by another friend of mine).
There are, of course, lots of programs out there depending on your talent.
Dancers have Alvin Ailey, musicians Juilliard, and there is even clown college if you’re a juggler! Some of these programs are affiliated with colleges, so that you can get an actual degree while honing your craft, and some are not, so that you won’t technically be a college student. If that is important to you, make sure you know if the school to which you are applying offers a way to get a degree. This can be vital for the same reason that getting a degree when you’re an athlete is vital: you may need a fallback option. You might even be able to combine your interests; one of my friends went to MIT to study music and engineering, and now builds organs around the country. It is an unusual job, to say the least, but someone has to do it, and there aren’t many people who know how.
How You Can Prepare While in High School
Like athletics, pursuing an education in the arts requires talent and dedication, along with the realization that most people still don’t make it big.
The difference is that most student athletes study something else beyond their sport, while many artists do not. That is why, if you are planning on pursuing a career in the arts, you MUST have the talent and drive necessary to succeed. Just as there are superstar athletes, so too are there superstar artists, actors, chefs, musicians, and dancers. But, those superstar athletes had two things going for them: natural ability and work ethic. That is what someone pursuing the arts needs. You might be a good painter in high school, or the star of your school’s musical, but it takes a lot more than that to make a career.
I can’t help with the natural talent part. After all, I don’t have it. But, just as athletes can go to camps in the summer, so too can artists. If the area to which you’re applying will require a portfolio, these will be especially helpful as you get to your Junior and Senior years. There are AP courses in art and music, and most schools now have dance teams and theatre programs. Most areas also have community theatre, and major metropolitan areas often have programming geared towards high school students at museums, studios, concert halls, and the like. If you live close by, do the research to find out what might be available to you, and if you can afford it, don’t be afraid to travel somewhere for the summer where you can develop your talent.
Overall, however, my most important piece of advice is this: you must have someone who knows what they’re talking about give you honest feedback.
Someone who, in one of the more colorful phrases employed by my college roommate, will not blow smoke up your behind. Praise is wonderful, but if you’re considering dedicating your life and education to art, truth is better. If you’re not good enough to succeed professionally, it is better to know that sooner rather than later, so that you can make other plans for your future. That is not to say that you need to kill off your artistic side, but that you have to be able to direct either towards something you’ll do for pleasure but not professionally or, as Mindy did, find a way to incorporate your abilities into your education.
This post, like my last one, only skims the surface of everything one can say about arts education, but I will again stress that if you have questions, feel free to use me as a resource, not to make you a better painter or actor, but to help you find a program that suits you.
Mr. K
Y O U M I G H T A L S O L I K E :
Learn more about these three different categories of colleges that you should aim to apply to and why they are so important.