going to uni

[ramdram]

And the best...worse? of it is that while the Unis trouser the cash another load of nippers will emerge from college clasping their parchment ready to join the ranks of the unemployed...not to mention a not insignificant debt.

 

Is this negative thinking? No, simply realism. Ask yourself if the industry can support yet more jobs/job seekers in the position you aspire to...if folk are being asked to work for the "experience" as opposed to the folding stuff then what do you think?

 

Ref the thinking bit...if you want a job in a position of SM, where you HAVE to think very, very quickly, as in when there's a crisis onstage or backstage it's you everyone will turn to. Ergo you should really NOT be asking for any ideas on where to do your course...you should be working that out for yourself.

 

You could have researched the UCAS site before coming on the forum...I can't believe UCAS was never mentioned at your school, or how to use the info.

 

Top Tip: to the OP and other aspiring techs/actors/musicians, read all the stage mags/papers and relevant posts of this and similar forums; go through the jobs vacant page(s) with a fine tooth comb.

 

Ring around and get some idea of the job market.

 

Get some idea of what your prospective employers expect you to have in the way of experience eg, amdram/school/events prior to going to Uni.

 

Be blunt and ask if a BA Honours degree is a help or a hindrance. Don't be upset if you discover that what is really wanted/useful is experience, experience, experience. You should not be surprised to learn, once you have your BA, that in three year's time there will still be a premium on experience...in the industry.

[David Ripley]

Be blunt and ask if a BA Honours degree is a help or a hindrance. Don't be upset if you discover that what is really wanted/useful is experience, experience, experience. You should not be surprised to learn, once you have your BA, that in three year's time there will still be a premium on experience...in the industry.

 

The relevancy or not of degrees in the industry is a matter of opinion. Also there is no general consistency of opinion about the degrees from different courses. There are some courses that many people wouldn't touch with a barge pole despite being 'degree level' and accredited by NCDT, others are highly respected.

 

20 years ago we had exactly the same position with tech courses offering diplomas. They all offered a qualification of some sort but there was no consistency of quality or student experience across them. The same now applies except it's degrees we are trying to compare. In the main they only became a degree for financial reasons. The AETTI NVQs that a lot of us worked on for free, whilst those at Metier made hay, ultimately failed because the English awarding bodies are commercial organisations and there was simply no money in Technical Theatre NVQs. At the time I think they looked for a minimum of 5000 candidates per annum which was unacheivable.

 

With the closure of many theatres, particularly producing ones, with more to come where are these entrants into the industry supposed to get their experience, experience, experience?

 

Hopefully CCSkills and the NSA will provide some of these answers as is the ABTT via the Awards system. However all of this needs industry support, whichever route newbies choose to come in and we should support them in these choices.

 

David

[Junior8]

Be blunt and ask if a BA Honours degree is a help or a hindrance. Don't be upset if you discover that what is really wanted/useful is experience, experience, experience. You should not be surprised to learn, once you have your BA, that in three year's time there will still be a premium on experience...in the industry.

 

More to the point ask yourself if after three years of accumulating debt you want to face the future in a job with sometimes little security, precarious prospects, incredibly unsocial hours, sometimes mediocre pay and variable working conditions. Things were difficult enough when I finished as a Drama Student in 1975 and I only owed £50! Even so I couldn't look at working in the business and getting married, the sums just did not add up.

 

I'm sure that the last poster is right in recommending the ABTT courses as a supplement to gaining practical experience - indeed I really can't think of what they want to include in a degree course to occupy three years anyway. (It's not as if there's masses of theory. There are only three books worth reading on lighting and they are essenatilly all the same and were published years ago. Only the equipment has changed.) Volunteer at your local arts centre, do anything that they ask, talk to any pros you come across, read the trade press and make a realistic assessment of what you want and where you want to be. And keep knocking on doors.

 

Teachers are far too fond of recommending Uni to everybody. You don't need a BA(Hons) to busk a show for a visiting duo or work a shift on a follow-spot or to cue a show for that matter. At least not in my opinion. You simply need commitment, iron self-discipline, the ability to do simple things well, energy, and experience....

[ramdram]

Ref gaining experience...I was very strongly hinting that you could not go far wrong by getting involved in the school play, then amdram (in ANY role) then your local theatre. If you were still interested in continuing with the technical theatre career then you were going in with your eyes open to the long hours and hard work.

 

Besides, from some posts in this forum we might decide some colleges appear to stray off the subject...but then, as from #18, I suppose they have to pad out the three years with something.

[David Ripley]

It may be that many courses are very badly affected by the Brown report. As Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences would not be funded under his proposals, this leaves a shortfall between the true costs of courses and the fees chargeable. Even with fees at 9K there is still quite a gap

 

This could mean a rapid deterioration of the courses. Unis etc will have to decide if they can afford the courses as they are or need to cut back the content or where there are specific courses, say in Lighting to cut the course entirely in favour of a more general SM/Technical Theatre course.

 

The Unis need crew for the performers so they won't cut courses entirely, also they couldn't afford to pay for crew but we may be about to return to a diploma style situation which won't help anyone.

 

At the moment many would argue that the UK produces the best technicians who have senior roles in productions worldwide. How long will this last if the basic educational infrastructure is no longer there?

 

From the governments point of view they are once again reducing the potential tax income by reducing employment opportunities. Over the years British Theatre has always paid more to the government in taxes, both direct and indirect, than it has ever received in grant aid and that's just the subsidised sector

 

If we care about the quality of technical theatre and it's teaching in this country then we need to start writing letters now

 

David

[haymere]

As someone who is older been in the business fifteen years and entirely self taught, I have seen many over the years who have "degrees". Largely these in the real world have been as useful as a chocolate teapot. What you need is a very good can do attitude. I say jump you say how high and lots and lots of experience. Experience IS there to be got local AMDRAM, local pa & lighting companies working for free and being totally logical and keeping your mouth SHUT. All I have seen is graduates who come out thinking they know everything and pissing everybody off.

 

Rant over

[smalljoshua]

A student's point of view.

 

I've been working casually in Sound and Light since I turned 16, it's worked well for me and I could continue to go on as I have been. I would learn by doing and could earn at the same time.

 

On the other hand, I want the underpinning knowledge that would be better gained on a degree. Going out and working can teach me how to do something, but it wouldn't show me why it is done this way, nor would I have the understanding I would need if I ever came across a situation where the original method wouldn't work and needed to adapt.

 

Josh

[David Ripley]

All I have seen is graduates who come out thinking they know everything and pissing everybody off.

And conversely those who have graduated from the 'University of Life/Hard Knocks' can be equally annoying as they have may have knowledge in a very specific area but find it difficult when faced with something outside their immediate experience

 

Ultimately it is horses for courses (or not) For some people any course is the wrong one for various academic based reasons, conversely others will want that structure to guide them through and allow them to make choices about their career path. Any decent college course will also encourage the students to take on extra curricular work where possible as they realise that the very nature of being in an educational institution changes the experience of working on a show and that they can't cover everything.

 

I have worked with both the self taught and the graduates and to be honest there are good and bad about both of them. I don't agree about working for nothing for companies. After all I'm sure your free time will be charged on to the client. There is a place for controlled work placements within college schemes but this kind of US internship I am not happy with.

 

David

[ramdram]

Ref #22

 

You would not have to attend Uni to learn this underpinning of knowledge...the internet is awash with tech gen. Simply google and all shall be revealed. I would say too that if "you/anyone" found it difficult to learn stuff from the 'net than perhaps Uni is not for "you/everyone" anyway. Gaining entry to Uni does rather assume you are at least proficient in the three Rs...and an ability to get on with stuff on your own, research for starters.

 

However "you/someone" may be absolutely first rate as operational stuff and soak up the actual "practicalities" like a sponge, so an academic course would be a a bit pointless...in that case. You may also be first rate at getting on with folk around you and everyone is happy to have you around...that aspect is far more important that you might first realise btw, especially during the latter part of a twelve hour shift...

 

You may discover the web info is more "recent" than stuff taught at Uni. This does not include the fundamental stuff such as the tending and care of decibels, which will always be the same, or, how colours "work" via additive or subtractive mixing, but, possibly RDM for example.

 

From experience, we found a fair few of the degree blokes working with us tended to trade on having a degree, even tho' they were not terribly good at operational work...which caused us to ponder why they had applied to work in a station such as ours in the first place. We would assume, perhaps unkindly in retrospect, that they were not quite good enough for Research Dept...or industry.

[Simon Lewis]

You would not have to attend Uni to learn this underpinning of knowledge...the internet is awash with tech gen.

 

So it is! And there are books too....! So why would we bother with teaching and learning within an education context (as opposed to a training one)?

 

Well, 'knowledge' is just the start of the process - the basic 'knowing the facts' and remembering them. Then there's the need to comprehend this knowledge and apply it to the subject area. So far, these are the activities you would expect at a training or technician level.

Beyond this, one would expect to see analysis, synthesis and evaluation, with the aim of being able to create new knowledge in the subject area.

 

There can be benefits and flaws in both the hands on training and degree education approaches (and I'm not trying to say one is better than the other) but the aim of the degree should be to develop the higher level cognitive functions in its students. Education should not, therefore, be viewed as being the same as training, but as having a different purpose and goal.

[J Pearce]

As a graduate and an employee of an educational establishment I would define training as 'This is how to do it', whereas education is 'This is how to work out how to do it'.

 

Uni helped me to develop analytical skills, an inquisitive mind and taught me how to research around a subject area. It taught me how to write reports and papers in a style and format that would be respected in the real world.

It gave me an environment where experiments were encouraged and ideas were worth trying out. Experience in a company often can't offer this as in business you have to play it safe and stick to the known.

 

Additionally uni gave me an opportunity to gain experience (paid and unpaid) and build up a network of contacts in the industry.

 

Would I recommend uni to everyone? No. Go to uni to develop 'higher' thought processes. Go to college to be trained. Go to work to earn money and get training/mentoring along the way.

 

In many ways I'd say the subject area is somewhat 'backseat', its the means to provide an environment of learning and discovery, rather than training.

[ramdram]

Hmm, ref #25 and #26...I believe that all this analytical stuff is far too academic for the vast majority of tech folk in theatre or events stuff, hence my support for the hands on approach...backed up by the academic underpinnings if desired. I can appreciate your views on training your minds but for working as a technician a degree is possibly overkill, possibly a hindrance.

 

Essentially the tech staff need to be able to do stuff in the blink of an eye in the event of a problem...there is no time for luxuries such as analysis. Where I worked the problem we found was that because of the training at Uni a good proportion of the degree blokes were not able to think fast enough...paradoxical though that might seem, but read on.

 

I mentioned in an earlier post that a "fair few" of the degree blokes where I worked were not too hot at the operational stuff...they would be working out why we had lost program instead of plugging up a new patch or receiver/aerial and getting the program back...only then would we worry why the circuit had gone down. Once we had completed the drills the fault lay, as far as we were concerned, in the inonosphere or Post Office, latterly BT, trunks switching.

 

I quite agree the degree holders were certainly OK on theory per se and the later entrants, before our station was sealed up and fully remote controlled, were rotated through, or ended up, in day maints, where there was no live program to contend with. The really gifted ones might try for Kingswood Warren, where their undoubted skills were of considerably more value in research, using the very attributes you have described.

 

And of course some of the degree holders found the operational work was not stimulating enough, for them, so left to pursue other more interesting careers. It may be that these trained higher thought processes were unable to be satisfied doing operational stuff, who can say? Some poor b&ggers ended up in hospitals of a certain description because they has set their hearts on a career with us but could not handle the pressure of live program.

 

I should add perhaps that I am talking of operational "hands on" tech staff in the theatrical industry, not lighting or set designers or sound engineers who design line arrays for example. I mention this because it occurs to me we may be talking at cross purposes.

[andy_s]

Why are you talking about "hands-on technicians" or designing a line array when the OP wants to learn how to be a stage manager?

 

This has all ranged a bit off-topic if you ask me.

[ramdram]

Indeed the OP did not say he wanted simply to be an SM...he mentioned technical theatre, in fact he was after a BA Hons in technical theatre as well.

 

We were discussing SMs and technical theatre. I put forward that the degree route was not the only way to become an SM...after all how did SMs becomes SMs before university degrees? (A case of a Uni jumping on the bandwagon perhaps?)

 

Some older members of the forum will know that SMs came up through the ranks as they say from "boy/girl/gofer" to ASM to DSM and finally SM after some years gaining experience...how many other routes were there? These older SMs would have understood their theatre intimately because of doing hands on themselves.

 

I suggested also that there were places for degree holders in technical theatre but in the R&D so to speak...such as designing/placing the sound arrays perhaps, but such folk would not necessarily be employed in "a" theatre, they would tour with a company possibly???

 

I intimated that sometimes it was possible to be over qualified for the job, as in what happens to those folk who are very competent at operational work but find that an operational job requires a degree and they don't have one?

 

In any event forums, as you have remarked, have a way of going off topic, that's the way these things go.

[Ken Coker]

Is this still going on?

 

As I see it, and please don't start sweaking down in north-west Kent, there are a number of craft occupations in the entertainment industry that do not have the intellectual epistemology to support degree level study; stage management, prop-making, board operation MIGHT be such examples of this. What's needed in these professions, if you ask me, is a craft apprenticeship where a person learns a job from a master craftsman. It might be argued that, almost by the default of having to support acting courses, colleges such as RADA/Mountview offered such a scheme - but it's a long time since I worked in any drama school.

 

To the original OP; do you want to be a stage manager or a technician? Go and visit these places and talk to current students - it can only help.

 

Right, I've warmed up now so I'm going back on the roof do do some more pipe-defrosting.

 

KC