Student Blog: One More Triton Autumn

At the end of September, I solemnly embarked upon my last first day of school. I’m now a senior at UC San Diego! It was a lonely, bittersweet thing to come to terms with as the summer drew to a close. In July I spent a few days in New York City, and one morning, I had the chance to grab breakfast with a director I admire who graduated from UCSD. About midway through our conversation, she asked me a question so stunningly simple that for a few seconds I had no idea how to answer. “What do you want to do this year?” It made me understand the temporal weight looming over the next nine months, seeing as for now, they are the last nine months of my time as a student.

There’s no doubt in my mind that getting a degree in theater has been personally rewarding (contrary to the chastising gaffes of countless STEM majors over the years,) but I knew I wanted my senior year to feature something that made it make sense. What project could I be a part of that allows me to look back and say “yes, going to college for theater became worth it because if I hadn’t, I never would’ve gotten to do ______.” But what fills in that blank space? And what does “worth it” mean? What does the theater program have that I won’t be able to find anywhere else? I don’t know if I can answer that. It isn’t something I had stopped to consider before this point.

As an underclassman, I built up this mystical, out-of-reach idea of “The Department” in my head only to discover that it’s nothing more than a stand-in for the producers and directors I’ll be applying to for the rest of my career. Getting the chance to audition and interview for jobs of varying capacities within an educational setting is a lot more valuable than I once thought.

In my acting classes and beyond, there has been nothing more useful to me than my professors’ feedback on my work. Theater is an industry where we are responsible for pitching ourselves over and over in order to find jobs. Why would I not want as many opportunities as possible to get better at doing so? And I got cast in a department-run show for the first time earlier this month, so I must’ve learned a thing or two at some point. I’m thrilled to be understudying various characters in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom directed by the brilliant Allie Moss. The fierce team we’ve assembled and the boldness of Moss’s vision make this feel like the kind of art that has never happened before and might never happen again.

Being back at school for this past month has felt like being dunked headfirst into an ice bath. It’s sharp, cold, and takes some time to get acclimated to the surroundings; but, more than anything, it reminds me that I’m alive. And that’s one of the countless things I can thank theater for.