When I first got accepted into AMDA, my friends, family, and peers were very proud of me, don't get me wrong! But some of them assumed that since I was going to a Performing Arts College, that it was going to be easy, just singing, dancing, and acting all day, 24/7.
Not gonna lie it got me down a bit, only because it made it seem like what I was doing wasn't as valid because everyone else was doing the "real work." When I complained about having to resend documents, or maybe buy things for the school year that seemed expensive. People would shrug it off, or say, "Well at least you don't go to a real college." The worst part was.... I let it get to me.
It wasn't until I actually moved into college, and started getting into the swing of things that I realized how wrong they were.
Most colleges and universities let students have guests of any kind come over, sometimes they can even stay the night, but not at AMDA. AMDA wants us to be fully focused on our education (which I absolutely understand!) so we can only have our immediate family visit us, and no one is ever allowed to stay the night. Granted our dorms are like closets, but still.
Standard college lasts about four years, at least for most degrees. But at AMDA we do two years of work, in only four semesters. You can probably imagine how fast paced the curriculum is! Needless to say, we're in our fifth week and midterms are right around the corner.
Now, here is the part where you're probably beginning to wonder what we do for midterms. Well, we have to memorize scenes, numbers, songs, patterns of music that we sight read, and other things as well and perform them in front of the head of all the departments. Nothing is written, and you do nearly everything by yourself.
But I mean this is no big deal, right? Because I'm not at a real college.
And don't get me started about those dance classes! They usually last about two hours, however, you could have multiple dance classes in one day (like me!) And this isn't like anything you'd see in your high school show choir or glee club. It's like full out, hot, sweaty, body aching dance. Usually in four out of your five days a week.
Did I forget to mention we also have tons of reading material to go through. Reading. In musical theater. Who would have thought of that! We read loads of librettos, plays, musicals, and sometimes we need to do extra research outside of the plays themselves to get a good sense of a certain time period or artistic style we're going for.
But, you know going to a performing arts school with a 31 percent acceptance rate has got be easy....right?
