Our annual Fine Arts College Information Night is coming up on October 10th, 2016, 7-9 pm at Mount Hebron High School in Ellicott City. If you are a student or parent wondering what the future may look like pursuing the arts (music, theater, dance, visual art), please join us for an evening of information and panel discussions.
College Prep
Portfolio Review and Audition Prep Opportunity
The West Virginia University College of Creative Arts will be holding an event for prospective students:
The College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University will hold Audition and Portfolio Review Days for prospective students and their families, Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 7-8, at the Creative Arts Center.
The events provide an opportunity to prospective students who are interested in being reviewed for admission into their program of choice in the School of Music, School of Art and Design, or the School of Theatre and Dance.
Saturday, Feb. 7, is for art and design, music, and theater students who wish to audition or present portfolios for review.
Sunday, Feb. 8, is for dance and music students who wish to audition.
Events will also include meetings with select faculty from each program, along with tours of the Creative Arts Center and meetings with financial aid and admissions representatives.
Students who plan to attend the Audition and Portfolio Days should register in advance. To see the full schedule of events and more details about the audition/portfolio review process, go to the website at http://bit.ly/1xyALTL.
All three schools offer cash awards and scholarship amounts up to a full tuition wavier. The portfolio review/audition days also serve as the application for scholarship consideration.
Students who would like to register may also call the School of Music at 304-293-4532 or the Schools of Art and Design and Theatre and Dance at 304-293-4339.
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CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4359, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu– See more at: http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2015/01/26/wvu-to-hold-audition-portfolio-days-for-prospective-students#sthash.qAq8PkOd.BMKgFcf2.dpuf
College Information Night is Here!
Make sure to join us tonight at our annual Fine Arts College Information Night. Registration begins at 6:30 pm at Howard High School in Ellicott City, followed by a short plenary session at 7:00 pm before breaking out into panel discussions for music, theatre, visual art, and dance. At 8:30 pm, there will be an additional session open for financial aid and scholarship information. Our event is growing still, and we would love for you to experience everything College Night has to offer.
Study: Music Education Could Help Close The Achievement Gap Between Poor And Affluent Students
From an article published in the Huffington Post:
Closing the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students could be as simple as do-re-mi.
In a study out Tuesday from Northwestern University, researchers looked at the impact of music education on at-risk children’s nervous systems and found that music lessons could help them develop language and reading skills. The study is the first to document the influence of after-school music education on the brains of disadvantaged children, as opposed to affluent children receiving private lessons.
Researchers from the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern spent two summers with children in Los Angeles who were receiving music lessons throughHarmony Project, a non-profit organization providing free music education to low-income students. In order to document how music education changed children’s brains, students were hooked up to a neural probe that allowed researchers to see how children “distinguished similar speech sounds, a neural process that is linked to language and reading skills,” according to a press release.
Photo of Harmony Project student, courtesy of Dr. Nina Kraus.
Students from the study, ages six to nine, were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of children who received two years of music education by the end of the study, while the second group of children had only received one year of lessons. This led researchers to discover that children’s brains only started to respond to the music education after two years of lessons. One year was not enough to have a definitive impact.
“We used a quick but powerful neural probe that allowed us to gauge speech processing with unprecedented precision. With it, we found that the brain changes only followed two years of music training,” Dr. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, said in a press release. “These findings are a testament that it’s a mistake to think of music education as a quick fix, but that if it’s an ongoing part of children’s education, making music can have a profound and lifelong impact on listening and learning.”
Photo of Harmony Project students, courtesy of Dr. Nina Kraus.
Leaders at Harmony Project approached the researchers after the non-profit observed that their students were performing much better than other public school students in the area. Since 2008, over 90 percent of high school seniors who participated in Harmony Project’s free music lessons went on to college, even though the high school dropout rates in the surrounding Los Angeles areas can reach up to 50 percent, according to a Northwestern press release.
“Now we know this success is rooted, at least in part, in the unique brain changes imparted by making music,” Dr. Margaret Martin, founder of Harmony Project, said in the press release.
Kraus told The Huffington Post that the study could be a case for expanding music education in school.
“It would appear that music is an effective strategy for helping to close the achievement gap,” Kraus said. “What seems to be happening is that this experience of making music is helping to create a more efficient brain, a brain that is going to be able to help a person learn and communicate, especially through sound.”
The Harmony Project and the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory have teamed up before to study how music education impacts students’ grades. Researchers previously showed that after one year, second-grade students participating in Harmony Project maintained or improved their grades. This compares to peers from the same schools whose grades’ dipped after not participating in music lessons.
“Existing research indicates that kids from poor homes are not learning to read in the first four years of school –- while kids from middle-class and affluent homes are,” Martin previously told The Atlantic. “Given the importance of reading in achieving an education, this finding is stunning.”
Let The Kid Study Fine Arts, Already!
While this particular article speaks to music specifically, these lessons are applicable to all forms of the arts. From Forbes.com:
The kids are back in school, meaning that one out of every four high-schoolers is entering his or her senior year. That’s college-picking time, and for some parents it’s a stressful ordeal. We get calls from concerned parents. They want to know “What major should my child choose? Which majors will lead to the most secure jobs?”
We tell them “Let the kid study whatever subject grows his flame. That’s where your child will grow the most.” Parents are befuddled. Flame? Growth? They want to know which course of study will give a kid job security for the rest of the kid’s life.
If you’re Swiss and connected to the right people you might be able to get a job in the Swiss Guard at the Vatican. I’d imagine those jobs are pretty secure. The rest of us are living in a gig economy. The only job security possible is the kind we carry around in ourselves. If your kid is musical, let the kid study music! A kid who grows the muscles every musician ends up with will never wonder how to make a dime. Musicians learn lessons kids in more ‘secure’ career paths have no notion of!
My five kids are musicians. I picked a practical major in college myself — vocal performance. Here I am today, singing, writing, drawing and speaking about the topics that interest me! There is nothing la-la or impractical about a music degree.
Band kids get up at the crack of dawn to sit on buses and nail their routines in tough competitive situations. Orchestra kids do the same, and learn to show up at a gig never having seen the music and play it all the same.
Singers stand on line in drafty churches and auditoriums waiting for their chance to audition, then brush it off with a nice gelato and carry on with their lives. This is the way all our kids should operate!
We delude ourselves when we sentence kids to practical courses of study that don’t light their flames. I know, because in our business we are overwhelmed with career-coaching requests from people aged 45 to 65 who wish they’d followed their hearts instead of the ‘safe’ career course. It’s never too late to get back to your passion, but they wonder “What would have happened if I’d taken a different road?”
A kid with a music degree isn’t limited to a performance or teaching career. Musicians are everywhere. We are project managers, marketers, Finance folks, IT people and engineers. In my twenty-some years as a corporate HR person, I was always impressed by the way musical people excelled at logic and non-linear thinking, both.
Musicians are tough. Any kid who’s talented enough to major in music has his or her choice of other degrees to pursue. Music kids outperform other majors on standardized tests, and they’ve got the chutzpah to follow their passion to a non-cookie-cutter career. Who would hold a kid like that back? Believe me, if the kid ends up finding the music business not to his or her taste, Oracle ORCL +1.43% will be happy to hire the kid as a programmer, and the kid will do a bang-up job.
Let your child follow his or her passion. That’s the way to build muscles in a child. When we tell our talented children “No, darling, don’t study what you love in college. College isn’t about you. It’s about getting hired four years from now” we tell the kid “I don’t have confidence in you.” These are the kids who grow up not believing that they have the right or the ability to follow their dreams. That’s why, in our workshops, we tell the participants “If you still have your viola or your oboe, get it out of the closet and play it! If you don’t have it, go to the second-hand music store and buy one.”
Music turns on your brain in a way business-work doesn’t. The good news is that music is free for the taking, and available to everyone. These days you can learn to play an instrument by watching Youtube, so there’s no reason for anyone with a musical bent to silence the inner voice that says “Play!” Kids who are drawn to music as a college major are special kids. They’ve already put in the time and effort few children are capable of at a young age, and it’s our job to encourage them rather than to tamp their flames.
Life is long. You can do anything you want professionally with a music degree, and young people go out of music performance and music-ed programs into law school, business school and even med school every day.
When your child says “Mom, Dad, I want to major in music” get a grip on your own parental fear (“What if s/he fails, and starves?”) and say “That’s magnificent, my darling! We are thrilled that you’ve discovered your passion at an early age.”
Then, rejoice!
Liz Ryan CEO & Founder, Human Workplace http://www.humanworkplace.com Reinventing Work for People
MIT Values the Arts and Humanities
A wonderful article from the Boston Globe points out how valuable MIT, the bastion of all things STEM, finds the arts and humanities for growing smart, talented, and innovative scientists and engineers.
Fine Arts College Information Night Is Here!
Please Join Us
Please join us for our first official meeting of the 2013-14 school year tomorrow night at the Howard County Board of Education offices. Our meeting will begin at 7:00 pm, and we aim to finish by 8:30 pm. We will be discussing plans for our annual College Information Night, primarily. Anyone interested in supporting the arts in Howard County is welcome to join us.
WVU College of Creative Arts to hold Audition/Portfolio Review Day Feb. 9
WVU College of Creative Arts to hold Audition/Portfolio Review Day Feb. 9
January 30th, 2013
The College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University will hold an Audition/Portfolio Review Day for prospective students, Saturday, Feb. 9, at the Creative Arts Center.
As part of the admissions process for the School of Music and the School of Art & Design, an audition/portfolio review is required for all applicants.
The School of Theatre & Dance does not require an audition or design portfolio unless the student wishes to be considered for a scholarship.
All three schools offer cash awards and scholarships—up to a full tuition waiver—to students who plan to study for a Bachelor of Music, Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
School of Music scholarship recipients are chosen by audition. The criteria considered include: musical accomplishments, scholastic record and musical proficiency.
School of Art & Design scholarship awards are based on portfolio submissions that exceed basic competencies and abilities.
The School of Theatre & Dance offers scholarships on the basis of outstanding talent, academic achievement and the student’s demonstrated potential for success in the program.
To see the full Schedule of Events and more details about the audition/portfolio review process, go to the College of Creative Arts website at www.ccarts.wvu.edu.
Students who would like to register for the Feb. 9 Audition/Portfolio Review Day may call the School of Music at 304-293-4532 or the Schools of Art & Design and Theatre & Dance at 304-293-4339.
The School of Music will also hold auditions on Sunday, Feb. 10 and Saturday, March 9, at the Creative Arts Center.
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cl/01/30/13
CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4359, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.
2012 Teen Opportunities Fair
Teen Opportunities Fair
Sat., Nov. 10, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
North Laurel Community Center, 9411 Whiskey Bottom Road, Laurel
This free event connects teens ages 11-17 with leadership, volunteer and recreational programs in Howard County. Attend powerful presentations, see dynamic demos, and learn about great things teens can do. Get connected to opportunities in academics, art, business, community, finance, government, job skills, leadership, music, nature and outdoors, sports and theater. Learn ways to build your resume, develop leadership skills or just have fun. Student leaders from the Howard County Association of Student Councils (HCASC) will share school leadership opportunities.
Parents are also welcome. For more information, contact Holly Harden at 410-313-4625 or visit www.v4c.hcyouth.org.
If you attended our College Information Night, you may see some familiar faces at this event, too.
Howard County Fine Arts Advisory Council 