Loyola Marymount MFA in Writing and Producing for Television 2012

[beezy16]

I just got accepted and wanted to ask everyone two questions:

1) Are you accepted for next year?

2) If you are in the program, can you please tell me how your experience has been?

 

[Razor Ramone]

Congrats Beezy! I was accepted for this year (Fall 2012) as well. Do you know if you're accepting yet?

 

[4ms4]

Hey- I'm about to start the 3rd year of WPTV- message me your Facebook name and I'll add you to the SFTV Grad society FB group w/ all 100 grads so toucan chat.

 

[beezy16]

Congrats to you too Razor! Still going through all the information about the school, but the program seems pretty great!

 

[Ddrhl]

How were you notified? I haven't heard anything.

 

[beezy16]

I am accepting!

I was notified first on my.lmu and a couple days later I got the letter in the mail.

Good luck!

 

[MovieMike]

Seems I'm like one of the last to get notified, but I did get in off the wait list.

 

[Ddrhl]

I never heard ANYTHING. Notification on my.lmu just says it's under consideration. I don't get it.

 

[David J Olson]

I'm working on my application materials for the Writing and Producing for Television MFA (Fall 2013). I'm curious, is there anyone still active on this forum who ended up enrolling, and if so, what are your initial thoughts about the program? I know that it's still early, but any and all information is always helpful.

Also, as a prospective student, I'm obsessing over which and what kind of creative sample to submit-- what kinds of samples did you guys submit? I'm an improvisor and comedy writer in Chicago, so I have plenty of stuff, I just can't for the life of me decide what to go with.

Again, any advice is helpful, and good luck with the rest of the semester!

 

[Razor Ramone]

To be honest, I've been let down by this program. I could go on and on, but the biggest disasters so far have been the instructors.

For our Film Studies class (TV history), we had an awful Romanian professor who had never taught before. She'd go on about Romania and the radio and didn't even touch the topic of television. It got worse and worse and eventually became so bad that she was removed after 6 weeks. But the students had to take the initiative.

After that, our Directing for Screenwriters professor was incompetent. Not only did we not touch on directing at all, we did these horrendous multicam projects that were supposed to be rehearsed in class, yet we'd have to come in late Sunday night, stay to the wee hours of the morning and come back in first thing Monday morning. If we had been given advance notice we could've booked the TV stage for rehearsals and done it at a suitable time. Without getting into details he also violated a lot of school policies and OSHA standards and is in the process of being reprimanded this week.

On top of this, LMU seems like a very greedy school to begin with. For undergraduates, it's pretty much open enrollment, so you'll be surrounded by idiots and the school itself will try to bilk you out of every nickel they can.

Over the past couple of weeks I heard many students talking about wanting to transfer. They probably won't, mainly because it's too late now, but it's been a very big disappointment all around.

My advice, apply to UCLA and USC, then this as an absolute backup and not a first choice like I did. It's hard for me to tell you this because I would like to see more quality writers here, but I definitely wish someone told me these things before I enrolled as chances are I probably would've passed on this.

Oh, yeah, and our biggest gripe is we do very little actual writing in script format. So while our competition at UCLA is pumping out scripts, we waste the whole first year on mindless busywork instead of actually writing a TV pilot or spec script.

As far as internships go, everything we are notified of is posted on sites like UTA Joblist. Make of this what you will...