Grad Adventures: In Which Shannon Signs up for Classes

Well, I've officially enrolled at the University.

I'm pretty stoked about it.

First, I went to an orientation meeting with all of the new grad students here. It was all basic stuff like security, when the buildings lock, how to register for classes, ID cards, etc. But I did learn some interesting facts. For example: 1,000+ students applied to the Grad School here, roughly 400 were accepted, and around 250 decided to enroll here. It's crazy! I had no idea that this college was so popular. Also, my college is part of 12 different colleges that make up the University as a whole, and there are a little over 1,200  students total in my particular college, which includes Music, Dance, Theater and Voice. So basically, it's small and selective and I'm very excited.

I also learned that I am one of 3 new grad students to the Wig and Makeup design program. All three of us come from different places as far as our educational background is concerned, and so I think it'll make for a really interesting semester and set of classes. It'll be neat to see how all of our different strengths work together and diversify the shop environment. One of the girls has her undergrad in visual arts from this university and took some of the intro courses to the program last year when she was finishing up her first degree and the other finished her undergrad 2 years ago and has been working professionally as a stage director for the past 2 years, so that's really neat too. We're quite the bunch! Like I said, they both seem pretty nice and that's good because I'm pretty sure it's just the three of us in all of our classes this semester. Which is crazy to me (talk about small class size).

THEN I got to register for my classes. I AM SO EXCITED!! That's the sweet thing about being in grad school - all of my classes are makeup related!! WOOHOO!! I'm going to be living in the shop, and when I'm not in class I'm required to put in x amount of hours in a week working there. It's a pretty sweet deal. After taking time away from makeup this summer I didn't realize until today just how much I was looking forward to getting started back in the theater again. It's definitely in my blood. This semester I'm taking:

Hair History
Makeup I
Wig Making and Styling I
Makeup and Wig Design I
Prosthetics
Approaches to Production (it's like a seminar with all the new Theater Design and Production grad students from all the disciplines that slightly differs depending on which professor is teaching it)

and while that amounts to 18 grad credit hours (AHHHH!!!) my faculty advisor said that there isn't really any out of class homework for these, so while it's a lot of class time, it's not too bad outside of the classroom. But, we can't forget to include time spent working on actual productions ;)

Speaking of which, I should be getting my design assignments soon! I will definitely update as soon as I know what those are :)

Well, that's all for now folks! Here's an arts/makeup quote to close us out:

"I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people" Vincent Van Gogh