thank you well hello hello and welcome to everyone out there joining us virtually I'm so glad you're joining us tonight for our admissions chat focused on Arts admissions with UCLA my almond alma mater FYI and while everyone is signing on I'd like to invite you to add any questions you may have for our featured speaker into the comments box and we'll bet we'll do our best to get as many as we can in before we finish up tonight and make sure to share your contact information with us so we can get your copy of the recording out to you after the fact by filling out the form that I'm just going to drop in the chat right now uh well for those who don't know me I am James Hayashi the admissions manager at college but of course since tonight is all about admissions in the field of Arts it's not about me but our featured guest Laura young the director of enrollment management and UCLA's school of arts and architecture this past week my college colleagues and I have been buzzing around with excitement and I'm sure they're all jealous that I get to chat with you Laura and bask in all your wisdom please join in join me in welcoming her away as a clue to just how ancient I am I was actually the writing advisor where Laura was a student in her graduate admissions or her graduate program since the mission of this series is to bring better access to higher ed and better information to college admissions to students and families I'm thrilled that you're joining us tonight thank you for having me yeah uh so as we dive into Arts admissions uh do you want to tell us just a little bit about your background so that people kind of know where you're coming from it's actually I think a a good kind of uh story of the marriage of the admissions part but also the Arts part sure um so I grew up in Los Angeles um so I'm I'm born and raised here and in high school I was I was that kid I was the Arts kid so that was sort of my I know I understand um I primarily I did a lot of Visual Arts I also did some stage work and I'm I'm very specific about that because I did not do regular plays and I did not do musicals I did comedy improv um and I also played and competed in Regional um competitions with classical piano for a long time for about 11 years so I've done I've like actually done most kind of like artistic practice at some point in my life except for dance like I can move my body but that is different from dancing yeah absolutely sir no judgment here neither am I yeah and then how I got into admissions was like everybody else who gets into admissions is by accident um I went to UCLA while somehow I'm a modder um I've I've been there ever since I've been on campus since 1998 and I haven't left so I did my BA in Fine Art there and then immediately started I was at the Hammer Museum for a little while which is a UCLA you know it is UCLA employment and then I moved over into the Dean's office in 2005 and have been there ever since working in Admissions and then I did my graduate degree at USC wonderful so uh brogen just like me um well as we're diving into Arts admissions could you talk us through a little bit about Arts at UCLA and any exciting hidden gems Arts programs sure um I mean at UCLA we are we're structured a little bit differently than all of the University of California campuses so all of the UCS do have Arts programs or creative programs but all of them are distributed a little differently across the campuses and UCLA has three professional schools for the Visual and Performing Arts arts and architecture The Herb Alpert School of Music and the school of theater film and television and we're known as kind of being the Arts campus within the system um because just in terms of our location I mean Los Angeles is an internationally known Arts location and the campus itself because we have so many professional schools in the Arts um is you know it's it's very noticed for that and then as far as hidden gems um one of the majors that I represent was actually the undergraduate major of your of the college's founder Jenny omofer it's called World arts and cultures so if you have any students who are you know with a lot of Arts Majors it's very like you know do you paint or do you play a musical instrument or like do you do an artistic thing like do you make or do art but if you expand on this idea of art making as a community practice um larger forms of visual culture like cooking is creative plant medicine is creative Community organizing and social justice is creative how do you teach and educate through the Arts and we have a major actually for that that's a Humanities based research major called World arts and cultures and I think it's really special because it makes space for Creative people who might not necessarily be artistic yeah thanks I love that you're highlighting that program it sounds like such an amazing opportunity for people who don't kind of follow those traditional modes of art but still have that creative streak in them yeah I mean you might make or do but not at this sort of level of like I'm gonna turn in a portfolio in which case there's room for that yeah well speaking of those portfolios one comment I hear a lot from students is that like oh if I have a really strong dance real or a great Oba audition I don't have to worry about my grades what's the reality of how students academics and their artistic abilities interact in the admissions process sure so each school is going to be slightly different but if you are going into the college admission process where you know if this one word saying we need a we need to see a portfolio or audition then you can be reasonably assured that that creative material is going to kind of provide a lot of context for your application going forward academics still do matter but there is a different kind of understanding around the academics because we know that you're spending your time differently if you're in say rehearsals from after school until nine or ten at night maybe you might get a B in an academic class instead of an a because you're trying to make you know trying to balance your time differently and you have different demands on your time it might also be that if your brain works a certain way then certain academic subjects aren't going to be your strength maybe you need to come at them slightly differently and you don't have an opportunity to do that so we take all of the academic records into context there so usually what happens is say if you're looking at a school that has a minimum 2.0 GPA and they're looking at a student who has a 2.5 and another student who has a 3.5 if their portfolio or audition material feels about the same to them they're likely to go with the student who has a 3.5 GPA because when you have kind of a you know the stronger your grades the better overall indicator of success that we can know you know if you're in a classroom environment um but if you if those two students are meeting the minimums and they love the portfolio or audition of the student with the 2.5 GPA and then they're like this is good like it's solid but with the student with the 3.5 GPA they're going to go with 2.5 but I always encourage students like try to do the best you can with your academics as much as you possibly can because if you're coming in with really solid grades and a really solid creative component then that can be a place where scholarships become available yeah so it sounds like of course that portfolio or addition are absolutely key it's still important for students to try to do their best the best they can in their classes just to keep as many doors open as they can uh well with those additional Arts materials like a portfolio a video audio recording an audition uh what's the process by which admissions officers actually review them again it's really different from school to school so if you are looking at schools where all of the majors are in the visual and or Performing Arts then it's typically either admissions counselors who are you know who have a background or trained in that arts practice they might involve faculty alumni evaluators so everybody does that everybody does it slightly differently and particularly for schools where if you're applying to say a liberal arts school either like a small liberal arts school or a research University one a school that has kind of every single kind of major across Life Sciences social sciences Etc then you can certainly ask how that creative material is going to be reviewed because there are some schools that will look at your academics and your kind of General application first and then after you've passed a you know an academic review then you get looked at for your Arts there are some schools where you turn in all the material right at the front and then the general review happens and the portfolio and the creative review happens kind of at the same time so it's like it starts here and then it goes like this and then the paths meet in the woods again um so you can certainly ask how your material is going to be treated and when we're you know when schools are going to look at what and what does that mean um yeah so I love first of all of the um hand visuals to help people kind of think about it uh so for students out there who haven't yet curated their portfolio or really aren't even sure how to start uh what suggestions do you have for them I mean right now up until it until it comes time um and that's you know time is a flexible concept but right now especially like just make the work make as much work as you possibly can I would say um like finish up for visual artists finish one piece per week the more work that you have and especially if you get used to this kind of flow of making work and also not everything is going to be successful in terms of you every single time so you have to make the unsuccessful work and the that's okay but I think I could do better like this is okay it's okay but I need to push it up a little bit more and then the oh this is this is successful and I feel good about this you need a range of all of that because when it comes time to apply you're generally not making new work for the college portfolio you're editing what you have there are some schools where they might give you certain assignments in which case we can you know you can look several months in advance to know what they're asking some schools will say we need you to make a work about the color blue or they'll give you a word prompt or something and that might be something that you need to make but overall schools are going to be asking to see a selection of work that you have already created so right now just make a lot of stuff and have a good time with it explore and refine explore and refine yeah I love that um especially as someone who's trying I do a little photography on the side it's a good encouragement for me as well just to keep shooting well for students out there just keep just make it thanks for the students out there watching uh just so you know there are ways to get your portfolio reviewed even before you submit for example the national portfolio day Association and I'll go ahead and drop the link in the chat uh for you uh well as we're segwaying into the Q a portion from viewers uh what piece of advice would you want to impart to all those budding artists out there Laura I would like everybody here to know because you know when I usually give presentations there is a lot of anxiety in the room about what are you going to do with this degree and how are you going to make money because all of the data that we see around Arts majors and careers is that it has low Roi return on investment so whatever money is being put into this experience and what it returns you know in the shape of a lucrative career um is not great and I just want everybody to know that Roi labor data which is calculated off of employment earnings is actually really spectacularly inaccurate when it comes to creative workers um rois typically calculated off of data from that's reported by employers on people who work a 40-hour work week and creative workers as a group behave very uniquely in the economy because up to 80 percent of them don't work a 40-hour work week they're usually they are poly occupational which means they have multiple jobs which is not as terrible as it sounds when you're working multiple part-time jobs and hopefully in things that you like and they are notorious for being self-employed um this is up to 78 and creative workers are also very highly educated up to 65 of creative workers have a college degree in something as compared to general population which is 35 so this is a very entrepreneurial very educated group of people who are excellent at escaping the nine to five and the way that labor data is calculated is it calculates off of occupation so if you are somebody who is say an architect who draws comic books and then if your comic book money which might you know might be say you're making like thirty thousand dollars a year or ten thousand dollars a year or fifteen thousand dollars a year but it's not going to be like a full salary what labor data does is it adds that all up and then it says here is the ROI like if you want to be a graphic novelist which doesn't look like a lot and then us on this end we're like Oh no you're never going to make any money as a graphic novelist when the numbers aren't telling you that that graphic novelist probably has two to three more income streams coming in so the good thing right now is one of the good things to come out of the pandemic is that the U.S Department of Labor has realized uh oh we don't track gig workers really well so they're working to really update their systems so hopefully we'll have a more accurate and more favorable picture of creative workers in the near future but I just want to put that out there because I think it's really important to know you can that's the thing that you want to do and make a living absolutely people out there either they want to do art and produce Beauty but they also want to eat and be able to right electricity but I love that all those things are important yeah I love that you're bringing in those uh left brain kind of statistics for all our right brain artists out there college we love data so I'm always glad to get more numeric information when we can uh well we're going to open up to viewer questions in just a moment so as we come to a close and as you guys out there pop your questions into our comment box I want to let you know that we're going to get to as many questions as we can but if you have questions that come up later and you'd like to ask Laura about arts or UCLA she's very generously offered to share her direct email with you so you can feel out to feel free to reach out to her and we'll pop her email address in the chat box there as well and also in there you'll see the link so that you can give us your contact information so we can send you a recording of this presentation after it's done and uh one question that I've been thinking about is since art students work so closely with their instructors who could have real a real impact on the student's professional trajectory uh do you have any tips for students on how to find out about their faculty and who they'll be at different programs the fun thing about the Arts is that there's typically a lot of evidence available if you're looking up who's going to be teaching you and also who's in your classroom with you because current students will have a lot of them have you know now a lot of things are on the internet um and especially with current students I've actually seen a real a real shift in how students are asking me about how to learn about the degrees where maybe a decade ago they would ask me a lot about the faculty but now they want to know about the current students and even the current students you can you know you can look them up you can search LinkedIn to see where they got their degrees from many people have websites you can see and usually colleges will put student performances up so you can really see what people are doing and they're like just like a couple years older than you so it becomes this really nice way to look at them and go oh maybe like I don't know if I can do that yet but I have this sense that I can and I can learn how to do it over here wonderful um particularly with music if there's if there are any musicians there's still very much though this culture in classical music in particular of being able to ask for sample lessons because if you are going into an environment where you're going to be working one-on-one with an instructor for four years you really gotta like them um so you can add a lot of instructors will offer sample lessons in an instrument there are a lot of schools that will open up classes if you ask can I come observe a class can I see they'll usually have some classes that are open for that and they can work with you just so that you can hang out and take a look yeah those are great Pro tips I mean for people just to think about how do they get as much information as possible with the instructors and the people they'll be learning from for those four years uh well since obviously you review a lot of Arts applications are there any no-nos things that our viewers should be aware of or try to avoid I mean specific to visual arts or Performing Arts overall uh maybe specific to the Arts so visual arts yeah okay um in the portfolio there is kind of a transition place where there's a real emphasis for the portfolio that where we want to see original work so something that is very much generated from you and which kind of clashes up against a really common way that people learn how to draw which is copying there's nothing wrong with copying um what is really common is we'll see like celebrates living or dead um a lot of a lot of fan art like zombie Disney princesses and a lot of Manga and Anime and those three areas are totally understandable in the sense that you're learning how to draw or paint and represent what's in front of you um for the portfolio it can be really difficult to kind of put your original thumbprint on any one of those because they're so embedded in like pop culture and how you know your voice can get lost so if say you know you're looking at a celebrity portrait and you're really interested in how to draw like the human head like get somebody live to sit for you and then that's what should get turned in not the portrait of Bob Marley because number one you're working from a photograph we know that you didn't draw it from life because he's dead that's the tricky part like we know we know it's not from life if it is then we got problems well wonderful thank you for imparting uh that advice on um on our group and and on people out there as well uh well this has been our admissions Chad Extravaganza uh with business admissions chef from Syracuse and a discussion of Holly selective admissions with Stanford if you've missed any of those info pack sessions uh you should absolutely check them out on our YouTube page which I'm also going to drop in the group chat and keep an eye on our events page uh the link is there uh for upcoming talks Center on topics like this uh we'll also be talking about the parental role in admissions demonstrated interests and one of my favorites crushing the Common App wouldn't which we'll walk through the whole application and help you avoid pitfalls out there and as a group that's really trying to reach as many families as possible to provide information and better access to college I want to thank everyone out there for joining us if you feel like you need more help remember that admissions professionals like Laura are there for you as a resource as as are your High School counseling offices draw on all that experience and college would love to support you at any step in your family's Journey but thanks again Laura for joining us thank you hi everybody foreign