Career Development Opportunities at Juilliard | Student Blog

In the three years that I’ve written for Juilliard Admissions, I don’t remember writing about career development opportunities here.

My first three years of training were so concentrated on craft that I didn’t think about the industry very much. Prior to coming to Juilliard, I was already working professionally as a theater actress in the Philippines, and I had my own headshot, résumé, and website, and I'm very grateful to myself that once I got here, I concentrated heavily on my craft instead of getting distracted with “industry” matters. By the time the first semester of fourth year began, our schedule was replete with classes about on-camera acting/auditioning/self-tapes, meetings with casting directors, résumé, and headshot review, panel discussions with agents, casting directors and managers, etc. Juilliard Drama took care of those matters for us.

Aside from the much-improved fourth-year curriculum this school year, there were career-development opportunities that I was able to take advantage of before my fourth year began. In the last semester of my third year, for instance, I was assessing my strengths and weaknesses as an actress and was wondering about what other parts of the training do I need more time with before I graduate? I realized that since I grew up in a different country and speak two languages (English and Filipino), I was still having trouble obtaining an American accent. I realized that if I wanted to have a career in film and television—which I did—I needed to have an American accent that I can drop into in order for me to get cast. I wasn’t about to wait until my fourth year—when all the industry people would come in—to truly work on my American accent. It’s not that I didn’t work on my speech in my first three years. Truly, I was very devoted to my exercises. However, my earlier speech classes taught a more standard American dialect—one that was more suitable to heightened text like Shakespeare — rather than a general American dialect, which is what I would need to get cast in American film and TV.

It so happened that in that semester we had an outstanding new dialect teacher, Jerome Butler, who specialized in accent reduction. I emailed him to inquire about possible sessions with him during the summer, when I could really concentrate on my dialect without the other burdens of school work. We talked about budget, etc. and then I applied for a grant from the office of career services. That was the first time I ever applied for a grant at this school, and I'm so glad I did it. It took a while for me to write the proposal. I needed to coordinate with Jerome about how to pay for the number of sessions that I needed even when the maximum possible grant money wouldn’t be able to cover it all. We talked about a possible deal through which I could intern for a specific number of hours in his office in exchange for dialect sessions—all of which was indicated in my proposal.

In the end, I did get a grant, I did proceed with the internship and the dialect sessions, and it took a load off my chest. Obtaining a general American dialect has been a big source of insecurity for me for the past three years, always feeling that I’m working very hard on my speech but cannot really hear or understand what teachers mean when they say that they hear an “accent.” Having some clarity on the specifics about the nature of one dialect from another was empowering. I am glad I took advantage of the grant, and I am grateful that such money-granting body existed in the school for students.

Regina De Vera
Group 48
Quezon City, Philippines