When I was an undergrad, I had a really awesome design professor and I thought he had the best job. I went to a very small school that had two full time professors (the acting/directing professor and the design professor) and a contract lecturer (management).

The two full time professors split teaching the history, literature, theory courses and then covered the rest of the required curriculum in their area of specialty, because of that, the classes they taught rotated a lot and they still worked on the productions with us.

(As someone who has now taught at a college level – that’s actually an insane amount of work they were covering, especially, I’m sure, in their first few years as they set up all those courses.)

None the less, at the time I thought, this is the way to go. Work in the field for a decade or two and then go teach it.

So I’m clearly backing up more than a year here with this story but covering a span of time between 2005-2020, additional things I did to help me get into my current program include:

• BA in Theatre Production and Literature
• Solid resume in stage management (and one that reads as more impressive than it really is in production management) – especially with credits from a few companies in the field I want to study
• MA in Theatre and Performance Studies
• Taught 3 college classes
• Saved up a substantial amount of money

Another fun fact, I applied to PhD programs in the US two other times in my life and did not get in. I applied to three colleges in 2009 and three colleges in 2016.

I got my MA in the UK in 2011 and always wanted to go back there for my PhD but could not figure out a way I could possibly afford it.

Funding is equally difficult to come by in both the US and UK for arts and humanities programs – not impossible, but difficult.

February 2021

I ran away to an AirBnB on a nearly deserted beach island and did some serious thinking about my life and my goals and decided I was going to give applying to grad school one more shot.

I looked up about a dozen schools with programs focused on experimental theatre and just wrote down the tuition costs and cost of living estimates to get a vague idea of how much this was going to cost.

Since I had done my MA in the UK, I researched schools in both countries and found that, if I had to cashflow this project, the UK was actually a lot cheaper. On average at least $10,000 (after converting currency) a year less.

I also noted that due to two things I could probably apply in the UK. I had substantial savings in the account I was calling “Down Payment” for the house I had given up on buying.

This mattered to for two reasons – when I applied for my student visa for my MA, I had to prove I had the entire tuition amount and one year’s living expenses in a bank account to get approved (this isn’t a thing anymore for US students, but I didn’t know that at the time). You don’t actually have to use specifically that money, but you did have to prove you had access to it. Also, I knew I did know I would have to pay a large initial tuition payment, if I got in, to get my CAS letter – a letter you need to apply for your visa.

I had a job as a digital event producer for a global company that has offices in the US and UK and I knew I could work part time for them while I worked on my degree. The pay for this job is well above minimum wage and by working even just three days a week, I knew I could pay rent and probably cash flow 75% of my tuition.

I know thinking about all the financial stuff isn’t the most ivory tower approach, but let’s be real, I’ll be graduating in my early 40’s. I don’t mind scaling back some saving and investing because I’ve done a good job with that the last several years, but I have no interest going into debt for this project at all.

Also, this a personal finance blog, ya’ll, we should always have a pulse on our finances. Do the things that make you happy, even take out the loans if you’ve thought it all through – but think it through.

• Sorted through the costs

March 2021

I decided what I wanted to research.

I went very high tech and on my next sojourn to the grocery store, I bought a single subject notebook and started writing down ideas of what I wanted to study.

It went from a very vague idea of “why was it so hard to find any kind of safety guidelines when we tried to do a show that involved the audience at the university I was teach at last year?” to this list:

• Ethics of intimate performance
• Applications of choice architecture and nudge theory
• Towards codifying the practice of ethics in audience participation
• Towards an ethical management of audience-participants
• A study of the practical strategies in the responsible management of audience participation
• How can we create safer risk management practices for audience participants in immersive experiences by drawing from ethics, duty of care and existing notions of safety?

(Welcome to my brain, you get the full on disorganized chaos direct from the notebook here.)

This matters because I knew I would probably be funding most of this myself, so I wanted to study exactly what I wanted to study.

You can search funded PhD options online for the UK to try to get a place in a funded program but good luck finding a theatre one, friends.

And then I realized that other than my cursory search for info related to those safety guidelines in spring 2020, I hadn’t read an academic journal article in 10 years and I didn’t have a clue what was happening in the field. Maybe people were already engaging with this topic.

Which is a key thing – you need a project that furthers knowledge to be considered for a PhD.

So I started hunting for articles on the topic and found that none expressly addressed what I wanted to look at. That hunt for info in spring 2020 had led me to a super interesting law article about the rise of lawsuits in immersive performance, but it noted that no one seemed to have a clue what to do about them.

I then found a fantastic article about immersive performances gone wrong that also literally raised the question of “but what are we to do?” and just left it hanging there.

And I started to feel I may be on to something. In the most recent articles I found, people are starting to note that clear expectation setting is a key, good thing that should be happening, but with little description of how. Many articles still just note that we probably need to pay more attention to duty of care.

…but how?

HOW?!?! Why is no one engaging with stage and production managers to work out a theory of how?

WE ARE THE HOW PEOPLE.

Anyway. I got kind of excited and it’s not exactly news to me that considering folks with theatre management backgrounds as academics is a very new and very small world. So I continued reading whatever I could find in my free time and (key point here) started looking up who wrote the really key articles and seeing where they taught.

Unsurprisingly, they were all in England (at least the folks who were kind enough to write in English, which is the language I am limited to).

Also, a little tip I found on the internet, since I didn’t have access to a university library to read journal articles, if I found one that looked really relevant but was behind a paywall, I would try to find a contact email for the author and write them a quick email explaining what I’m hoping to study, that I will be applying to schools soon but I’m currently not in school and can’t access things through a school library, and ask if I could possibly have a copy of their article.

After the journal pays them (if it even pays them), they don’t usually get paid again per download or anything, so you aren’t taking any money from them. They are usually thrilled someone wants to read their article.

Every single person said yes and emailed me a copy.

• Decided what I wanted to research
• Started trying to catch up on current research in that field

April 2021/May 2021

I made my list of schools to reach out to, tuition costs, extra benefits to their programs (some had additional teacher training, etc.), living costs in that area, etc.

Then I emailed the person I was hoping to study with, explained the subject I wanted to study, and asked if I could set up a time to chat with them.

After chatting with all of them, I narrowed my school choices down to three. One of the people I spoke with advised that I just apply everywhere in the hopes that one will accept me.

I have heard this advice a number of times when applying in the US in previous years too, so it’s probably solid (and perhaps part of why I didn’t get in anywhere in 2009 and 2016 because the programs are super small and highly competitive and in each case I only applied to a few).

Three was a really small number but after all of those initial interviews, they were the only three places I was still really interested in going and the only three people I felt like I had a really good vibe with when chatting during the initial interview.

And I get that “vibe” is a really silly metric, but I stand by it. You have to spend a lot of time with this person over the next several years and be comfortable saying some really dumb stuff to them at times. You have to be comfortable enough to be wrong sometimes.

I’ll tell you right now, my first initial chat left me low-key scarred. The vibe was way off and the dude made me feel dumber than a sack of bricks from word one. He referenced all sorts of stuff I had no idea about (again – 10 years away from academia).

Because of this, I give you my golden hint – set up your first interview with the school you are the least interested in.

Shoot, if I were to do this again, I might possibly pick a school I have no real interest in and do this, because I wrote down everything he referenced during our chat and made sure I was familiar with it before I talked to the next school.

And despite that experience being wildly stressful and fairly horrific, he did point me towards looking into LARP pre-event practices and told me that Nordic LARPers are like the world leaders in best practices, which has turned out to be a really interesting path to follow. He is a very, very clever man and if I ever meet him at a conference or something somewhere down the road, I will thank him for that suggestion – and then maybe run away. But the thought of answering to him for three to four years made me a little nauseous.

So I was super relieved when I logged onto my next chat and the potential advisor was lovely and brilliant and encouraging.

An interesting thing I learned during these (though it took me a few of them to connect the dots) was that each potential advisor would take my idea and turn it a bit towards what they found interesting in it. So there were a few people I chatted with who totally disregarded a lot of what I viewed as the importance of the management aspects of the research. Once I realized this, those schools tended to drop off the list.

The school I wound up picking was actually in a dead heat with another until my final interview with the people who would be my full panel and it included a production manager with his doctorate who was specifically very interested in that vein of my proposed study and was viewing it in a very similar way to how I was instead of trying to minimize its importance like every advisor from a performing/directing background kept doing.

I also started researching alternative funding during this time – scholarships in both the US and UK, as well as teaching opportunities.

• Made a list of schools to apply to based on potential advisors
• Reached out to chat with each one
• Started a list of possible scholarship/funding opportunities with links to applications and deadlines

June 2021

My list of three schools was set, so I looked up how to actually apply to each one.

This is delightful because they were all different. Some schools just required a quick blurb about what I wanted to study. One required a full 3000 word proposal and partnered me with my potential advisor to work on it for months in advance over several meetings before she approved it for me to submit.

I will also say this is brilliant on the part of this school because while I didn’t go there, it was the other school in the dead heat with the school I selected. That advisor was absolutely lovely and I already knew I really like working with her from how the next three months of working on that draft went.

And she put in so much work with me I don’t think I’ve ever felt guiltier about not selecting something. But in the end, I really felt like the school I selected had the best opportunities for me in the long run.

So that was a fun thing I didn’t expect  – three months of work on something that needed to be approved by my potential advisor before I was allowed to submit it.

Also, JUNE IS TOO LATE TO APPLY TO UK SCHOOLS. Like… they have super flexible admission policies over there, but if you are moving from another country, waiting till June to start this extremely slow moving official process is going to make your life difficult.

As you will see in the upcoming winter months of this story.

Overall, sorting my applications took all of June and well into July.

• Decided which schools to apply to and found their application requirements
• Continued my scholarship quest

July 2021/August 2021

I reached out to confirm my references. Fortunately I only needed two for each school I applied to.

Unfortunately, I have not been great at staying in touch with my references.

I have one former professor from undergrad (the one mentioned in the opening paragraphs), who I have stayed in touch with my whole career and I regularly remind him that he is just stuck mentoring me for life. So that one was a given.

Reference number two was much harder. For many years it was another professor from undergrad but a few years ago he very inconsiderately died on me. This is a fun fact of waiting many years to get your doctorate – a lot of folks who might be excellent references aren’t necessarily around anymore. (This may sound flippant or callous – he actually meant a lot to me and I was heartbroken when he passed. I also think he would appreciate the practical bent of that advice though.)

So I reached out to one of my MA lecturers, and, quite honestly, she would’ve been my number one choice to be a doctorate advisor (which I told her when I emailed her), but she has actually left the field and gone into psychology. She mentioned that was likely to be frowned upon as a reference and suggested I reach out to a different professor from the same program that I had worked with, but in several of my interviews, I had mentioned that she was one of my former lecturers and that was where my initial interest in the subject began and as she was a leading expert in this field for several years, everyone knew who she was.

After a few awkward exchanges (sorry you haven’t heard from me in 10 years but now I need a favor sort), she did write a reference for me.

A fun thing I’d forgotten is that she was always slow to respond and does things at the last minute. So this exchange took about a month and a half to sort.

I also knew my other reference also does things at the last minute, so I just blatantly lied about the dates that things were due with a two week buffer window.

Another legitimate option probably would’ve been to have a director from an immersive production write me a reference, but I found that most of those directors aren’t ones that I would feel very good relying on to get something so important to me done by a set date.

• Reached out to my references
• Worked on applications

August 2021

All applications but one were fully submitted. I was still waiting for final approval from the one that had to include the full proposal to submit it.

Fun fact – you will not reach any humans on a campus in England in August. That is vacation time.

This month was largely a wash. I kept reading some books and articles for my proposal.

• Submitted most applications

September 2021

Finally approved to submit the last application. All of my references were submitted by the first week of September too.

• Finished submitting applications
• Confirmed my references had submitted

October 2021

My potential advisor at one university emails me early in the month to tell me he has Covid and it may be a few weeks before he can sort out my official interview.

Nothing happens. Wait.

• Waited

November 2021

Official interviews at all schools. These varied from just chatting again with the same person I’d been chatting with the whole time as they ask me a list of “official” questions that we’ve already covered, to a full panel interview with everyone who would be on my committee.

Last week of November – officially accepted to two schools, no word from the one I now want to go to the most. Reach out to the advisor at school choice #1 and tell him I’d really like to go there but I need to let the other schools know my choice.

The next day he emailed me to let me know I was recommended for acceptance and should receive an email soon, but also let me know that the school sometimes moves a little slow.

• Official interviews
• Received acceptances
• Decided on which school

December 2021

Turn down the other two schools and wait for my “official” offer.

Receive unofficial/official offer with a note that they just need a copy of my official transcripts and a copy of each of my diplomas.

Have a really fun back and forth over the next week about “do you literally need me to contact the schools and have you sent the actual diploma?”

Finally sort it all out mid-December and get transcripts sent over (no diplomas) and then the holidays happen and nothing happens.

Realize that the beginning of this adventure is likely to be completely insane with moving countries at the very last minute and start trying to cram in more and more reading for a lit review, set up a system for cataloguing what I’m reading, begin an annotated bibliography, start a very cursory housing search (but can’t do anything about it until I have a visa), reviewed visa requirements, open a new credit card to put expenses on to churn for the reward points…

Learned that you now have to pay a fee to access the NHS while in the UK on a student visa (I don’t think this was thing in 2010-11… or it was just rolled into the visa fee? Or I just forgot?) and that I have to pay for all the years in one go. Still way cheaper than America but a surprise like £2000 fee.

And I am super grateful I now have a full draft of a proposal I can turn in at this school if I need to as well.

• Worked with admissions office to get them the documents they needed
• Started looking for housing
• Reviewed Tier 4 visa requirements
• Started reading blogs on tips for first year grad students
• Kept reading journal articles
• Started a “To Read” list

January 2022

Mid-January I finally got a notification my transcripts have been opened and the next day I was told that if they need anything else, they will get in touch with me.

I was scheduled to start remotely on February 1^st and to be on campus by March 1^st.

I started looping my advisor in weekly with a quick note about where I am in this process. Around the third week of January I also asked if there was anything I could be working on ahead of time since I’m trying cram in a few extra shifts at work in the local theatre before I move in February and have so many work restrictions with my visa.

I mentioned I started some work on my lit review, which my supervisor said was good but not super important. Apparently I’ll need to meet with my panel again to discuss what I should expect and do three things that are acronyms that made no sense.

I also roughed out a timeline for this whole thing, which he is pleased with, but I will definitely be reviewing again after meeting with the panel.

I was also aware that the undergrads and MAs also all started classes this week so he is probably pretty swamped.

Largely I just kept reading, cataloging what I read and waiting.

I read several blog articles from grad students about how to prepare but the vast majority are STEM – which has plenty of similarities but also leaves me wondering what the differences are for someone going into a humanities program.

I also fussed around with a few note taking apps, which I did find kind of worthwhile because I really liked some, really hated others, and was surprised that I really did like a mind-mapping app but it took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it. If I had been in a rush, I probably would’ve just not used it.

The last week of January I finally got my formal acceptance letter from the school. Approximately two months after the first informal confirmation from my supervisor that I had been accepted.

My contract had February 7^th as my start date and March 10^th as my first day on campus. I signed the contract and the IP agreement and read through the graduate student handbook I was sent.

A common theme I read in the blogs was to set up a good note taking system early.

• Set up my system for tracking what I read (Google Form  Google Sheet)
• Tested and decided on which note taking app to use
• Played with a few other apps suggested by the grad student blogs
• Continued reading for my lit review
• Created a suggested timeline for my project
• Kept looking for housing
• Signed my student contract and IP agreement

February 2022

I paid my tuition deposit so my CAS letter could be issued. I spent a day driving around to banks and Western Unions to try to sort out the whole thing, which was wildly confusing. I was particularly perturbed that even though it said in big letters all over the payment page that I could pay via credit card, I could not.

On February 2^nd, I was handed over to the department that deals with CAS letters and started corresponding with them. They were actually phenomenal and every step moved pretty quickly.

On February 7^th, I logged onto the school website and completed my initial registration. I couldn’t access the next step of registration for grad students but continued looping my advisor in to my progress.

I paid the rest of my tuition for the semester.

On February 9^th, I was issued a CAS letter stating February 10^th as my start date. I did my visa application that day and was approved subject to completing my biometrics appointment.

I paid my visa application fees and my health surcharge fee for the next four years.

I learned the soonest biometrics appointment I could attend within every state that had a reasonable driving time was March 2^nd, so the odds of me being on campus by March 10^th were…. slim to none. Also, the system to search for biometrics appointments is pretty horrific and you can’t just search for “soonest date in America” but you have to search each individual appointment location. So that was cool.

So technically from February 7^th on, I was a postgrad student, though it was actually like two more weeks of administrative nonsense to sort to unlock the assorted orientation activities that I was supposed to do.

To be fair, if I wasn’t starting remotely at an odd time of year, there likely would’ve been a little more guidance regarding how to log into all these things.

• Paid my tuition deposit
• Paid the rest of my tuition (voluntarily, I could’ve waited a few months to make the next payment)
• Submitted my visa application
• Paid for my visa and health fee surcharges for the entire course
• Made my biometrics appointment
• Registered and started my program

But the train has left the station and things are happening.