It’s finally here.
After years of dedication and hard work, the UCLA Department of Theater can finally say for the first time ever, yes, we have a theater minor.
The new minor, which officially began this quarter, provides students with the opportunity to take small classes in one of the most competitive and renowned programs in the country with the best faculty in the industry.
The coursework for the theater minor combines a study of the history and theory of theater alongside hands-on training. Students are required to take two lower division theater classes, including Theater 10, before they can petition through their major department to minor in theater.
Bill Ward, chairman of the department, believes the program’s strengths lie in its small class sizes.
“The opportunity to have individual attention and small classes in skills that are essential in so many fields, no matter what your major is, should make it a popular program,” Ward said.
In addition to providing students with individual attention and applicable skills, the minor also brings an unprecedented connection between the School of Theater, Film and Television and the greater UCLA community, which Ward says has been one of their “long-standing goals.”
“(The minor) provides our students with an opportunity to interact more with students from other parts of campus, which is a valuable part of their education,” Ward said. “It (also) gives people a chance who are interested in theater to take some of the courses, even though their parents made them take biology instead.”
Ward said the minor has been the dream of the faculty for a long time. It has taken five years to create the program, with the approval process taking the last year and a half.
Jeff Knox, a third-year history student and one of the first students to enroll in the minor, is one of many students who have been waiting a long time, too.
“If I have one regret about the theater minor, it’s that it took this long to get started,” Knox said. “If there had been a theater minor from the very beginning, I probably would have known I was a theater minor before I knew what my major was.”
Knox has been performing in plays since third grade, but wanted to explore other interests in college.
“I don’t necessarily want to go into theater,” he said. “I do want to go into a profession that involves the elements of performance, namely sports broadcasting. So I kind of turned my back on the theater major simply because I wanted to major in something in the (College of) Letters and Sciences.”
Although the student demand for a minor in theater has always been large, the possibility for this opportunity has never been available before because of a lack of funding and facilities, said Cheri Smith, student affairs officer for the School of Theater, Film and Television, and advisor to new theater minor students.
“I get it all the time that TFT is very particular and it’s very strict to get in, and it’s really because of the facilities,” Smith said.
However, with the advent of new enrollment funding, allowing for an increase in enrollment and the creation of more classes for students not majoring in theater, the department was finally able to create the classes and hire the faculty they needed to provide for this much sought-after minor, according to Ward.
Even though new funding allowed for an increase in facilities, students in the theater major are still concerned about losing their resources.
Lilach Mendelovich, a second-year acting and directing student, believes that as long as the theater minor program doesn’t detract from the finite resources that students in the major have, it will be beneficial to have a theater minor for non-theater students.
“Undergrads have very limited resources compared to graduates,” Mendelovich said. “We’re very possessive of what we do have. But as long as it’s not taking away from our time here and our resources, then it is a positive thing.”
Another thing that made the minor easier to implement at this time was the amount of classes that the department started opening up to students not in the major. About a third of the classes in the department are currently open to these students.
“We’ve been trying to inundate students with the belief that there are classes available for nonmajors in both film and theater,” said Dean Dacumos, director of student services for the School of Theater, Film and Television. “We really opened up the opportunity the last couple of quarters, and now that we have these, the minor is easier to derive.”
Ward believes that now that the minor is open, it will provide a new way to arouse students’ interest in the arts, which will allow the rest of the student body, staff and faculty to have more exposure to theater.
“We view part of our responsibility of enhancing the accessibility of performing arts to the campus community, not just by coming to see shows, but also by seeing what it takes to do them,” Ward said. “Ultimately, if you have a society that doesn’t have an exposure to the arts, there’s nobody going to the theater to see the work that our students do.”
The theater minor not only helps to achieve that goal, but it also fulfills the desires of students from all across campus.
“I’ve always been drawn to the theater classes,” Knox said. “Even if it didn’t help me graduate.”
Until now.