Student Blog: One Last Post

On May 12, 2020, I was sitting at my computer waiting for a class to start when one of my classmates sent me something on Instagram. He had shared a post from BroadwayWorld's Instagram story that said they were looking for student bloggers for the summer. Theatre and writing are two things that I really enjoy, so I submitted an application and waited. I didn't really expect to hear back from anyone, but I still checked my email every single day for the next week. On May 19, exactly one week after I submitted my application, I received an email letting me know that I'd been accepted to the program.

By that point in the year a lot of crazy stuff had already happened. I began the year performing at the Region 5 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in Sioux Falls, SD; my college's production of Be More Chill was one of seven invited productions at the festival that year, and nearly everyone in attendance at the festival came to see our sole performance. We returned home and immediately got to work on another show, opened and closed it, began rehearsals for the final show of the year and then were told that we couldn't come back to campus for the remainder of the semester because of COVID-19. So getting to write for a popular theatre news site wasn't even the craziest thing to happen to me last year, although it was certainly a big deal.

The day after I found out I was accepted to the program, I wrote and submitted my first post, which went live on May 26. Drawing on my experiences from my freshman and sophomore year of college, I used my first post to give my advice to any high schoolers interested in doing theatre in college.

At the end of the summer, I was given the choice to either leave the program or continue writing in the fall. At that point I had already started classes at the University of Central Missouri and I knew that I was going to have plenty on my plate, but I also really liked having this creative outlet, so I decided to stay on for the fall. At the end of fall, I decided to go ahead and continue writing during the winter season. By that point I really struggled coming up with exciting topics to write about, but I decided that I wanted to stop writing after a full year, so I stayed on the program for spring.

In recent months, it's been kind of tough keeping up with my posts, and it's been especially tough finding things to write about that I find interesting and that I think others would be interested to read, but now I've made it a full year and I'm proud of what I've written, even if some posts aren't as interesting as others.

It's really crazy to think that a year has passed since I wrote my first post. It's been a great pleasure getting to write for BroadwayWorld, and I'll be forever grateful that I was given the opportunity. I don't expect that there are people who have read every single post of mine, but if by some chance there are, I appreciate it (but you really didn't have to do that). If you haven't read them all and you're interested, now's your chance to get completely caught up because this is my last post (but you don't have to do that either).

It's been fun, BroadwayWorld. Feel free to find me on social media (particularly Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) under the username "shutupholden".

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