5 College Majors Theatre Students Should Also Study

Back to School

Business, psychology, and other concentrations will build your skills so you’ll become an even better artist.

College is a formative time for many. It’s when students decide what profession they may want to pursue, or receive additional training to expand their current careers. For those who are looking to become working theatre artists, either onstage or backstage, the go-to move in college is to major in theatre. While a theatre degree can be a way to learn about the industry and gain a foot into it, any working theatre professional will tell you that being a theatre artist requires more skills than knowing history, acting techniques, or design principals (though those are important, toy).

In honor of Playbill’s Back to School Week, we want to help you hit the ground running when you enter the theatre industry. Here are some majors you might want to consider pursuing in addition to theatre.

Business/Finance

Unless you are hired on staff at a theatre right out of college, most theatre professionals are freelancers—meaning they take care of their own paychecks, taxes, health insurance, and all of those other unglamorous adult financial things. Most theatre artists are basically a one-person business. Taking college courses in business and finance will help you figure out how to properly budget your money as an artist, and how to best run your future business (especially if you want to do something more ambitious like create your own theatre company). At the very least, if you take a business course, you’ll learn how to do your taxes properly as a freelance artist, which can save you a sizable amount of money in the long run.

Communications/Marketing

Speaking of being a one-person business, every successful business has one thing in common: good marketing. Being able to successfully attract strangers is an incredibly valuable skill in an industry where eyeballs and attention is paramount. Consider taking courses in marketing and communications, so you can better relay to people who may not know who you are why they should pay attention to you and your work. Those communication skills can also be valuable if you decide to pursue a career in theatre marketing (Broadway marketing professionals are some of the most under-sung yet valuable people in the industry).

Psychology

What is theatre if not a representation of the human condition on a stage? And what is a theatre production if not a group of people coming into a room together. That’s a lot of egos and psyches to manage. Taking courses in psychology can help you better learn about human behavior so you can better resolve any future conflicts that come up in the rehearsal room and be a better collaborator to your colleagues. And if you’re an actor, it’ll also give you tricks to understand people who are different from you and what makes them tick, helping you create better characters on the stage.

Engineering

This is for those who plan to work backstage in design or technical theatre. Making the physical parts of a show—the set, the costumes, the lights—is not just playing around with a sketchpad or a switchboard. There’s math and geometry involved. Taking engineering courses will help you create theatre productions that aren’t just artistically inventive, but also feasible, safe, and within budget. No one likes a designer who dreams up something that is too complicated to safely pull off.

Education

Many theatre artists moonlight as teachers, spreading the love of the artform to the next generation of students. If you’re as passionate about imparting knowledge as you are about theatre, consider a degree in education so that you can better communicate your passion to your future students. After all, where would we all be without the impact of teachers?

Click here for even more theatre-adjacent majors.

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