YAHOO CALLED ME "USELESS"

Yahoo headline reads, "College Majors That Are Useless" Number 3? Theatre...
By Kirsten Guenther (Writer and former Theatre Major)

"Here's the good news: Sign up for theater as a major and at least you'll be really good at acting like you have a job." 

Reading these words made me want to take the person who constructed this sentence outside and do what any theatre major would do—burst into spontaneous song in his face. But alas, I don't have his address. So I'll take out my aggression here. I'm supposed to be rewriting an opening number (something I learned in theatre school), so I should probably thank this Mr. Terence Loose for helping me procrastinate (something else I learned in theatre school). 

Me in The Winter's Tale, at USC (Where I majored in Theatre)

I'm not going to moan and groan about whether or not a theatre degree is or isn't useless. Instead I will just point out the flaw in the thesis of Mr. Loose's article—or rather in the information he discussed in his article based on the National Association of Colleges and Employers' (NACE) 2012 Job Outlook study. Whether or not a theatre degree is useful can only be measured by how often a person uses the skills they built and practiced while earning that degree.

Speaking clearly, Communication, Collaboration, Listening, are just a few things we practiced every single day at the USC School of Theatre. Whether my peers became actors, accountants, dentists, travel agents or investment bankers—I'm willing to bet that they're speaking, communicating, collaborating and hopefully listening, on a daily basis.  Inputting data into an Excel spreadsheet is another extremely useful skill that I exercise daily that we did not learn at USC theatre school—luckily there's a tutorial online.

Read the rest of the Yahoo article here.

Comments

[KMM]

This is utter bullshit. I have a lot of friends that I know who say things like "i have a BFA in theater, the only thing I know how to do is perform."

I'm sorry, but that is just being stupid.

A background in theater provides you with interpersonal skills that make it easy to transition into any number of careers. Many people just have problems thinking outside the box. For those of us that live in NYC, there are jobs here that don't exist anywhere else. Jobs for which there is nothing you can "major" in to be prepared for how to do them. Being in the theater teaches us about creativity, making something work when given limited time and resources, dealing with strong and difficult personalities, and dealing with how people think and feel.

I think as actors it's important for us to be well rounded people. We SHOULD have other interests, which will in turn make us better more informed actors. Its when artists don't cultivate these other interests and stop thinking broadly that they get trapped.

There should be another study: What people major in and what percentage of those people spend their lives hating what it is they do for a living.

Now I shall step down from this soap box.