Master of Arts Degree

The 30-unit MA program prepares students from a wide variety of backgrounds for careers as teachers, administrators, managers, scholars, and creative figures within a variety of performing and media contexts. A major objective of the program is to prepare students for competitive entry into doctoral programs, though we recognize that many of our students will not take this path but rather apply their advanced research skills in other areas.

Students in the MA program learn research methods appropriate for constructing new ideas in the performing arts. They learn historical, cognitive, aesthetic, and cultural realities governing the evolution of theatre, film, radio, television and other media; they learn to evaluate from a critical perspective; they learn to develop persuasive arguments and to sustain the attention of a highly erudite, critical audience by their skill in constructing a masters thesis which makes a serious, original contribution to knowledge about the performing arts. Students acquire skills in teaching, scholarly writing, information gathering, data and text interpretation, performance in different media, research and performance technologies.

Graduate study means making discoveries and changing the way people think about how performance media represent the world; it means gaining the confidence to speak, write, read, demonstrate, and communicate with authority (or "mastery") about the power of a particular connection you have toward performance media.

If you attend full-time (9 units), it will probably take you four semesters or two years to complete the program. It is also possible to attend the program on a part-time basis.

An Integrated View of the Performing Arts

We pursue an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the performing arts. The department does not make graduate-level distinctions between areas of specialization; students with tv, radio, film, theatre and dance backgrounds are all considered "Theatre Arts" graduate students. The evidence is overwhelming that people who are successful in the entertainment industry or academia can apply their knowledge and skills in different performance contexts, across disciplines, or in relation to diverse cultural identities. Opportunities today strongly favor people who do not put disciplinary limits around their capacities to identify and solve problems which do not necessarily observe any "borders."

Performance

As a producing theatre and media program we present an annual season of live stage plays and films, and numerous studio and student directed projects. Our award-winning radio station KSJS 90.5 broadcasts 24 hours a day, 365 days each year. We have become increasingly focused on video production, both for television and multi-media, and our actors and crews spend more time in front of and behind the camera every year. We maintain our own multi-media laboratory, acknowledging a field of performance which puts us on the cutting edge of the entertainment industry and takes advantage of our special geographic location in Silicon Valley.

Success in the graduate program depends on academic, research-oriented skills, not theatrical performance skills--although we certainly encourage graduate students to become involved in our production; nearly all of them do, to the great benefit of the department, and they receive credit toward their degrees for their contributions. Graduate students may assume various roles (actors, directors, writers, producers, designers, technicians, consultants) in relation to different performance media within the department: theatre, dance, film, television, radio, video. The department offers many opportunities to participate in productions. These productions range from large-scale mainstage interpretations of classical texts and popular musicals to television sit-coms, films, to daring modern dance performances to laboratory presentations of work in an experimental mode.

Benefits of the Degree

What can you expect to gain from acquiring an MA degree? Teachers in K-12 education find the MA quite valuable in advancing their careers. Employers in almost every form of business look upon the MA, regardless of area, as proof of a person's seriousness about education and determination to work within a complex institution to complete a fairly rigorous and challenging program. In some mysterious way, having the graduate degree forever sets you apart from those who never achieve it. The greatest benefit of the MA degree is that it signifies your power to think and act on a "higher level" than is expected of those who do not possess the degree. It presumably signifies your superior skill at analyzing, communicating, and motivating. It identifies you as a"problem-solver" who can lead, decide, or clarify the actions of others. If a PhD is your objective, you may decide that you will be seeking a doctoral program in Theatre Arts or Communications or Gender Studies or Cultural Studies or Media Studies or Comparative Literature, and so forth, all of which accommodate performance-oriented research.

After the M.A. Degree

Our graduate students have found such responsibilities in the film industry, television production, computer software design, political activism, computer graphics, health services, journalism, religious institutions, theatrical equipment services, and theatre production. Some students have formed their own production companies and even schools which are active in diverse sections of the Bay Area. One of our American graduates has formed a theatre company which is performing quite successfully throughout Southeast Asia; her thesis explored intercultural and intermedia relations between Japanese classical drama and postmodern or cinematic adaptations of the classical style. In recent years, graduates from our program have gone on to complete doctoral programs at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, City University of New York, Temple University, University of Minnesota, and University of Oregon. Our graduates hold (or have held) teaching positions at University of Pittsburgh, Santa Clara University, University of Georgia, Bangkok University, Smith College, Arizona State University, University of Washington, Stanford University, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley. Two of our graduates have published their Master's Theses as books, while many others have presented their research at conferences in such places as North Carolina, Tokyo, Salt Lake City, Oxford, Mississippi, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Boston, Honolulu, Washington D.C., and Jakarta, Indonesia. Several papers produced by our graduate students have been published in international scholarly journals, our program has produced Outstanding Thesis Award winners in College and University competitions. Students in our graduate program have contributed strongly to innovative and successful productions both on campus and off.

The university world tends to regard the MA as an initial, preparatory step toward the doctoral degree. While competition for entry into doctoral programs is quite intense, no other Theatre Arts graduate program within the CSU system, according to our data, has been as successful as ours in placing students in doctoral programs.