So Your Son Wants to Major in Theatre...is this a wise choice?

A son or daughter’s choice of a theatre major is upsetting to some parents, but trust me, there are plenty of successful people in this world who chose that major.

One reason to major in theatre is the strong relationship between theatre and business!

You know Chicago’s “Second City” for big names in comedy, right? Tina Fey, Amy Pohler, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, etc. But did you know that Second City also does corporate training? The Second City, through its corporate division Second City Works, provides professional development workshops that apply improvisational theater techniques to critical business skills. Rather than focusing on technical tasks such as writing presentations, their programs use interactive, improvisation-based learning to enhance interpersonal interaction, agility, and communication.

The corporate workshops are categorized into five core areas:

1. Leadership: Empower & Inspire

2. Presentation Skills: Speak with Impact

3. Navigating Change: Agility in Action

4. Innovation: Breakthrough Thinking

5. Teambuilding: Connect & Create

Over the past 24 years, thousands of corporate exectutives have benefited from these Second City’s workshops.

Many successful individuals in the communications, business, law, and medical professions either majored in, minored in, participated in, or benefited from the study of theatre. Many lawyers and doctors majored in theatre. Theatre majors actually perform exceptionally well in law school admissions. They hold an average LSAT score of ~154–156 and an acceptance rate to law school hovering around 77% to 82%, which is higher than many traditional majors like criminal justice or business. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/nhalliance/pages/861/attachments/original/1571682729/Majors_Thrive_Law_Data.pdf?1571682729   Theatre majors—who are grouped under the "Humanities" category by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)—systematically outperform traditional Biological Science majors on the MCAT. https://residencyadvisor.com/resources/premed-guidance/mcat-score-distributions-by-major-who-performs-best-statistically 

In addition, a variety of companies actively recruit students with a theatre background.

Corporate training, sales, and arts administration are three major professions that actively recruit students with a theatre background due to their advanced skills in communication, adaptability, and public speaking.

Corporate training departments value theatre graduates for their ability to command a room, design an engaging curriculum, and facilitate role-playing exercises for leadership development. Examples of professions are Corporate Trainer, Instructional Designer, and Talent Development Specialist.

The tech, medical, and corporate sectors frequently hire theatre students for sales roles because they possess high emotional intelligence, “the ability to take the word no and accept criticism”, and the ability to think quickly on their feet. Examples of positions are Account Executive, Corporate Recruiter, and Fundraising Officer.

Entertainment companies, museums, and non-profits actively seek theatre majors to manage operations, coordinate logistics, and oversee the execution of live programming. Examples of professions are Event Planner, Arts Administrator, and Company Manager.

If you, as a parent, are still freaking out because your son or daughter is choosing to major in theatre, please read on.

Theatre can be a practical choice of a major for a student IFF (that is a math term meaning “if and only if”)…

1. The student couples it with another major, minor, or cluster of classes, such as Communications, Media Studies, Creative Writing, Screenwriting, Public Relations, Advertising, Arts Administration, Arts Management, or similar. These are all still “art-related” and do not involve much (if any) math or science. [I have noticed over my 42 years in recruiting students that theatre majors tend to dislike math and science.] Another way to go is to add a couple of computer and business classes (or even as a minor or double major) to your schedule and arrange for an internship in one of those areas.

2. The student embraces all major aspects of theatre (acting, technical, and directing), not just one. Don’t just act. And don’t just pin your entire set of hopes and dreams on becoming a famous professional actor. If it happens, awesome---but prepare yourself for a Plan B.

3. The student secures an internship early---and not just a theatre or theatre management internship. Apply for a communications, public relations, event planning, or advertising-type internship. They love to hire individuals who have the skills that come from theatre. Some internships are paid, others are not. Be willing to take on an unpaid internship if it will help launch your career.

4. The student is in as many productions of as many types of productions as possible. My suggestion is to choose an affordable small college that puts on a LOT of different kinds of theatre performances. The smaller the college, the higher your chances of being involved in virtually all productions all four years. Many of these small colleges offer huge academic merit and theatre scholarships. In fact, some small colleges also offer art, music, theatre, and dance scholarships to students regardless of their major. Being in lots of productions will build your resume and increase your skills. There is no need to spend $90,000 a year to study theatre. Many of these colleges cost no more than the mid to upper $20K’s after merit, yet have 95-99% placement rates. A few end up in theatre as a profession, but most enter corporate life in professions that I have already mentioned in this essay.

Professor Matt Fotis, a friend of mine (he was one of my recruits when I worked for Monmouth College) is now a theatre professor at Albright College in Pennsylvania. On Medium, he wrote an excellent article about the many marketable skills that come from the study of theatre. He has given me permission to add his essay, in its entirety, to this article:

It’s easy to [criticize] theatre majors. “All you’ll do is roll around on the ground pretending to be animals.” That’s true. To be fair, you also walk around pretending to be animals. If you’re advanced, you also do some climbing like animals, or even some improvised scenarios as animals. In addition to honing your animal impersonation skills, more importantly, theatre is also the major that develops the most in-demand soft skills in the marketplace. No other major, including business, better prepares you to enter the 21st century workforce.

Before we get into the capitalism of it all, let me say you should major in theatre because it makes you a better human being. You learn empathy and visual aesthetics and storytelling and acceptance and all sorts of great things that make life better. It’s also completely valid to be a theatre major so you can spend your life making theatre. Go figure. So, major in theatre because you want to make art. That’s great.

This article is about the skills you develop in the theatre and how you can use them in the corporate world. For an art based in storytelling, we’ve done a terrible job telling the story of what majoring in theatre does for you beyond the stage. So, here goes.

Look, there are obvious technical skills some employers are looking for. You aren’t going to get hired to program computers if you don’t know how to program computers. Being in a college production of Our Town isn’t going to help you land an accounting job — even if you were the best Stage Manager Grover’s Corners has ever seen. But because the world moves so quickly and technology changes overnight, the jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist yet. So, what most employers are really looking for are soft skills. ZipRecruiter’s 2022 “Job Market Outlook for Grads” said that 93% of employers are looking for soft skills. Things like creative thinking, the ability to collaborate, adaptability, time management, dependability, communication, interpersonal skills. You know, the things you learn working in the theatre.

Back to those technical skills for a second. Every job has technical skills to learn. Some of them take a really long time. No matter how good you were in Les Mis — and you are a legitimate triple threat — you aren’t going to get certain jobs without extensive technical training. But the vast majority of job-related technical skills really don’t take a long time to learn. And they change over time, sometimes rather quickly. You know what those employers want? Someone who can learn those skills quickly and correctly — someone who can adapt. And guess what? We teach that. Like, literally, that’s what theatre is on a process level— quickly learning and applying new skill sets to build upon existing skill sets.

Theatre helps teach you how to learn—we have to learn new skills, research new worlds, and solve tangible, practical problems with every new production. Actors quickly learn stuff all the time — new dialects, speech patterns, physical movements, sword fighting, etc. They research time periods and constantly expand their emotional capacity and empathy. Technical folks are always doing new things with each production — new building techniques and challenges continually present themselves. Every production has at least one technical “How in the world are we going to do that?” problem. And guess what? Every single one gets solved one way or another — and they have to be solved in a cost-efficient and timely manner. Throwing money at the problem is never an option in theatre, so we get very good at problem-solving. We are constantly learning new skills in the theatre. Since we do it so regularly, it means we are really really (really) good at learning in a tangible “real-world” setting.

Now, about those soft skills…Experiential learning is all the buzz in higher education right now. Guess who’s been doing experiential learning for decades? Let’s put that into corporate speak — in the theatre, you get experience working in a collaborative, project-based work environment. Employers want that. There are very few majors that give you more hands-on, experiential learning opportunities in collaborative, team-based, deadline-driven projects (corporate speak for the win!) than theatre. Hell, theatre gives you 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 such opportunities PER YEAR.

If you’re not familiar with the theatrical production process, a theatre production is a lot like a company. There’s the director at the top and the actors are like the salespeople — the public-facing folks. Just like a company, there’s more than just the salespeople — there’s A TON OF WORK that goes on behind the scenes. A theatrical production is one big team with lots of smaller sub-teams, all working toward a common goal with the most fixed of hard deadlines and a grand public roll-out. Just like most corporate teams are made up of smaller divisions and teams, in a theatrical production it only works if every team simultaneously does their individual job AND works together toward the cohesive team goals.

Say you are working on your school’s next show. It actually doesn’t matter what job you have…but let’s just say you are working in costumes. I’m not going into industry specifics here — let’s just look at the structural layout. As I said, the production as a whole is one big team, and the costume team is a smaller team within the larger team (flow charts!!!). There’s a head of this team that reports up to the director, just like in a corporate setting. Your costume team has specific tasks and deadlines to meet, meaning you are simultaneously working individually, as part of your smaller team, and as part of the larger team.

You have to:

Work individually to accomplish whatever specific tasks you’ve been delegated in a timely manner. Let’s say you’re building, pulling, and/or organizing costumes for characters X, Y, and Z.

Work as part of a small team to meet the team’s deadlines, which often means working collaboratively as well as merging your individual work with that of the team’s work. So, while you were building, pulling, and organizing costumes for three characters, two of your teammates were doing the same for six other characters. Now the three have to work together to figure out the best combinations that fit the overall design of the production to present them to the designer or shop manager (I’m sorry, costume friends, I’m vastly oversimplifying everything you do for clarity’s sake);

Coordinate with other small teams. Your team has to work with stage management and actors to coordinate measurements and fittings. You then have to make changes (say one of your actors is 6'5" and nothing fits him…I’m so sorry), and/or work on other show-specific tasks. Perhaps there is a quick costume change that must happen, so you now have to work with the actors and director and stage crew to make that happen (and maybe you’ve never sewn magnets into a costume before, so now you are quickly learning and applying a new technical skill). In corporate words, you are engaging in cross-department collaboration and problem solving in real time;

You then work to synergize your work into the work of the large team. In the theatre, this is called tech week. So, we’ve spent weeks and weeks working individually and in our small team to get the costumes perfect. Now, all the small teams are coming together to put everything together to achieve our ultimate team goals. This merging of teams often means there are new problems and challenges (the director hates that wig now, Character Z’s jacket needs to come off more easily, Actor Y just ripped his pants, etc.) that we then have to work to solve in a very timely manner, often under very high-pressure circumstances.

Central to all of this work is effective communication. There are lots of moving parts, so communication is an essential skill for successful productions. And if you work your way up to one of the leadership roles in theatrical production, say you are the costume shop manager or assistant shop manager, you also have extensive experience managing expenses, juggling multiple time-sensitive tasks, delegating responsibility, managing employees, and cross-departmental communication.

So, you’re working individually. You’re working collaboratively. You’reproblem solving, both individually and collaboratively. You’re constantly communicating. You’re learning new skills and applying them in practical ways. You’re working within very strict deadlines. You’re often asked to adapt to changing circumstances. You’re working with lots of different people. As a theatre major, you practice and perfect these HIGHLY TRANSFERABLE SKILLS…ALL. THE. TIME. You can work under pressure, under tight deadlines, you can adapt, you can problem solve on the fly, both individually and collaboratively. And you do it many times throughout the school year.

Imagine how well refined some of your soft skills are after 4 years of productions (not to mention all the technical skills you pick up along the way). Say you do 5 or 10 (or 20 or 30) productions—no other major gives you that kind of sought-after experiential learning. You can walk into any job interview with dozens of examples of how you worked within a team to face and meet a myriad of challenges. You have extensive experience working in a collaborative, team-based, deadline-driven project environment with actual stakes (you know, because at the end of the day an audience pays to see your work). That kind of experience is invaluable and makes you highly marketable.

So, go ahead, major in theatre.

So, parents: Relax. Theatre is actually a very practical major if approached correctly.