Friday, May 12, 2006

Undergraduate Transcripts

The Lugubrious Lycanthrope writes…

I have two screenwriting classes on my transcript. I have zero interest in screenwriting now (I was seventeen when I took those classes), but I can understand if a committee looks down on screenwriters. Do these classes on my transcript work against me? Like I'm just looking to write a bestseller, something that can be easily turned into a Tom Cruise movie? Does it make me look like someone who isn't serious about fiction? Or will they not look that closely at the transcript?

That will be exactly zero of an issue, LL. Don’t spend time worrying about your transcripts: 1. There’s nothing you can do about them now, and 2. No one on the committee is going to care if you took screenwriting or not. Rock on.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Niiiiiiice. Good to know that screenwriting = hoping for a Tom Cruise blockbuster. Just the laugh I needed to start my Friday! Thanks!
p.s. flame letter much?

Anonymous said...

Right, right, I think I agree with the first commenter -- why a Crazy Cruise blockbuster and not, say, a Charlie Kaufmann or a Woody Allen movie? And I say Ch. K. because I don't want to sound too haughty, but hey, Fellini, Mikhalkov, and others are screenwriters that do, or should, command the kind of respect that great writers do! But I guess we're nit-picking here. LL was probably too lugubrious when writing his question -- I doubt that that is his official take on screenwriting in general; it seems it was his (lugubrious) worry about how the commmittee would read his transcripts :)

Jason Michael MacLeod said...

If an MFA program looked down on screen writing to such an extent that they deny you admission because you took a couple of courses once . . . then that is a wacko program you want no part of. Futher (as a current MFA student who has just completed my first screenwriting course as an elective) I found that screenwriting teaches structure in a way that is often ignored in traditional fiction workshops.