Blog: Are you Ready?

By Drama St Mary’s Academic Director Mark Griffin. Today sees us launch our pre-induction website for students heading to Drama St Mary’s in September. It’s a new initiative that we’re trying out to try and ease our new recruits into the way in which we think and work. We hope that if students engage with the website they’ll feel slightly more familiar with us on arrival and hit the ground running. It’s part of a bigger project to overhaul the whole of our induction process, moving away from the idea of the induction week, with days spent between long meetings of information overload and nights of hedonistic revelry, to consider the process as starting when a student first accepts a place and continuing on until they’re safely established on the course. This might be at the end of the first semester, it might be longer. The work here is very important, so anything we can do to help students focus on being in the rehearsal room, motivated and moving forward, we will. Graduation is only a couple of weeks away now and inevitably that means we’re beginning the process of looking for new students to join us in September 2014. This year we’re taking a pro-active approach and taking our auditions out beyond campus, visiting, schools and FE colleges to try find the 100 or so most talented and exciting young actors in the country. We’re also looking to expand the international aspect of our work. Former student Leone Hanman is touring the States in the Autumn looking to find the best American students to attend Drama St Mary’s auditions in New York in November. Our campaign is running under the slogan ‘Are You Ready?’ and already we’re receiving some pre-UCAS applications. Drama St Mary’s will only ever be as good as the students we recruit and we know that the synergy of a really powerful group of young actors, working alongside the excellent staff here, can lead to remarkable work. We’re ready for that to happen at St Mary’s.