What is so wrong with Drama Degrees?!?!

NOT true. Medicine, Law, Veterinary Science and Architecture are the hardest to get into by miiiiles.

Some of my architecture courses have 3000 applicants for 100 places. Thats 50 applicants per place. craaazy, and they all ask for AAA. so actually drama isnt the easiest to get into, but it certainly isnt the hardest!!

I love it at GCSE, of course its a valid degree. Surely it is not too different than going to stage school.

Lots of people just think you act, but there is soooooo much more than that.

how do you know if you get negged? I dunno how it works :s

Scroll down to the bottom of your home page, you'll see a blue bar with your status on it and your rep on the right, click on the arrow next to it and it'll expand and show you your rep.

I treat it as a valid subject. However, getting a job with a drama degree is bloody hard. My sister did Drama at Birmingham, and in the 4 years after her degree the majority of her work has been in a retail environment, despite applying to jobs more related to her field.

Oh also, saying you couldn't find the anonymous check-box probably isn't going to massively improve the reputation of prospective drama students :P

I'm 23, currently about to start my final year at RADA. I did my degree at Cambridge in Philosophy and started at RADA two years ago. I've had incredible experiences at both places and don't regret my decisions for a minute, even though I am very conscious that I'll be 24 years old before I even start trying to gain employment in a very competitive industry.

I looked into doing drama degrees at age 17/18 and found the content in them to be singularly unimpressive. I didn't feel that drama degrees covered different periods in theatre nearly as thoroughly as I would have expected and when compared to other subjects I looked into, drama seemed like an unchallenging option.

Drama degrees seem to be to be taking the worst of both worlds and I believe that a lot of people who couldn't get into drama school end up doing drama degrees.

The second issue I have is with the amount, or lack of, of work involved in the degree. The drama students I know spent huge amounts of time hanging about, gossiping, partying, getting involved in mediocre student productions and spending very little time doing actual productive work towards their degree. A lecture in another subject would be an intensive hour of note-taking, concentrating and trying to assimulate facts in your brain; an hour of drama would start of with a quarter of an hour of gossip, followed by a casual sit-down-on-the-floor discussion which would always be dominated by the most pretentious of the group, followed by some practical 'work'. I have friends doing drama degrees at the two 'top' places in the country, Bristol and Warwick and even they admitted that their degree was a bit of a joke. I was shocked to hear that one friend only wrote eight essays all year, was given frequent extensions, and had an assignment, supposedly the work for the week, entitled 'observe a scene and write a commentary about it'. I have a recollection of being given this same assignment in a Year 7 drama class. In contrast, I wrote 48 essays a year, (2 a week, for 3 8 week terms), frequently worked well into the night and learnt a huge amount.

As you can see from the education I have chosen, I am deeply interested in drama and theatre and will be pursuing a career in acting when I graduate. I am not trying to criticise anyone who has done a drama degree; I am merely expressing my opinions and experiences and I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has contrasting opinions.

The last essay I wrote was about the suffragettes for example and how they used theatre and performance tools to promote the cause.

I imagine the majority of people don't realise how much work goes into a single performance, let alone three years of performance!

I'm more backstage doing Stage Management, Lighting Design and Set construction, when I told a friend how much work I do on each production, they suddenly decided that I wasn't a lazy sod after all!

The amount of time spent in rehearsal and learning lines for an actor is huge, far more than writing an essay or five. I've had the same problem with people calling my choice 'easy'; that is until I tell them that I'm working solidly from three months before opening night just to get the curtain to open at 7:30pm!

MJ

What I'm trying to say is that I do not underestimate the amount of work involved in theatre and putting on productions. However, this is NOT academic work and this is not the kind of work you would be doing in a drama degree. If it is the kind of work you study in a drama degree then I do not believe it should be an accredited degree course because this is practical work. However all the drama degrees I researched and know of (admittedly these are all at Russell Group universities so not from a very broad sample) are studying wishy-washy parts of history of theatre at a fairly superficial level. The fact that the drama students I know have so much time to get involved in student productions outside of their degree suggests to me that their degree is not challenging enough.

I'm an actor so I do realise how much work goes into each production. I know from first hand experience how being in a production can absolutely take over your life. I've had experiences of being up all night the day before opening night to get a scene right or get a dance choreographed or spending five hours practising getting an entire set off the stage in exactly ten seconds.

I've worked in rep over the summer as well and I can categorically say that this was far and away the hardest experience of my life, including studying for my finals at Cambridge. We would be rehearsing one play from 9 to 5 every day, getting into costume and warming up for a different play at 6 and on stage from 7 to 10. We would have to put on a new play every week, for three months.

What I'm trying to say is that I do not underestimate the amount of work involved in theatre and putting on productions. However, this is NOT academic work and this is not the kind of work you would be doing in a drama degree. If it is the kind of work you study in a drama degree then I do not believe it should be an accredited degree course because this is practical work. However all the drama degrees I researched and know of (admittedly these are all at Russell Group universities so not from a very broad sample) are studying wishy-washy parts of history of theatre at a fairly superficial level. The fact that the drama students I know have so much time to get involved in student productions outside of their degree suggests to me that their degree is not challenging enough.

Firstly grats for getting into RADA.

I'm off to Bristol next year, Russell group, as you probably know. It's 5* for research and you don't get that by playing games all day, the course info on the site or prospectus (which I assume is where you 'researched' the course) has very little info to what the course actually entails. It is a research orientated course, directly linked to the research interests of the lecturers who teach there, therefore the topics studied and covered vary from year to year so your statement that the areas covered are wishy washy is quite frankly nonsense.

As you say you are an Actor...and one of the first things they tell you is that they reject an application that remotely resembles that of someone who wishes to be an actor (same for manchester and posibly warwick...not sure though), so thus you could probably not empathise with the motivations of the vast majority of people on the course. From what I can tell, people on my degree course have done pretty darn well for themselves in terms of evolving the entertainment industry as well as the academic. The whole point of the degree is to explore drama, to attempt to understand, analyse and re-interpret a medium which has been at the centre of human culture for millennia. It is not simply about sitting in a lecture room being barked at about brecht, or going over and over stavivlaski methods in an acting class. It's abut challenging your assumptions, playing with mediums and expanding on the academic aspects of the subject as well as obviously providing you with a foundation knowledge, all which (correct me if I'm wrong here) is the point of an academic arts degree?

You probably did the right thing, most directors I know, including one former RSC director, say that actors doing drama degrees prior to drama school suffer from an obnoxious attitude and usually have to unlearn everything they think they know about acting in order to develop themselves on a drama degree. So well done, you made the right choice for you.

But for some people, people for whom the experience of drama is not simply confined to the act of performance, who are curious and inquisitive about the subject area as a whole, who are hungry to learn more about it then surely an academic degree, provided by the likes of Bristol is just as valid as doing philosophy, history of art or english lit degree?

Put it this way......it's like the difference between reading The Republic and understanding the Words and reading the republic and desperately wanting to understand why it was written, what precisely it means, is it right, evaluate your opinion on it, form your own conclusion and use if positively or negatively to create your own standpoints.

I understand what you are saying but just out of interest, what do you think you can get from a Drama degree that you cannot get from an English Literature degree where you would study theatre, novels, poetry, different cultures and other mediums of literature which have had a significant effect on theatre?