 So now that I've accidentally become a student ambassador for the College of Charleston, um, I just figured I just, I just, I'm gonna roll with it. Hi everyone, um, my name is Katie and I am a rising junior at the College of Charleston and I study arts management. You might not have heard of that major and that's why I'm making a video because when I was navigating all this like two years ago, like it would have been helpful to have someone like explain it on YouTube because like I don't know that's always just like my answer for everything. I'm like, hey, there might be a YouTube video on it. Yeah, what I can say is like I'm not an expert. I haven't finished my degree yet. I have to go back. I'm on a gap year because of COVID. Um, so yeah, take a minute to like this video if you liked it, it really helps, you know, get your video so other people can can find it or looking for this type of thing. And also comment any questions that you have down below because I'm always happy to answer them. And like, I will get to them. Like, I will. Also, oh, I have a new Instagram for this account. So if you want to go follow me on there, it's called Katie goes nowhere. Because I'm on a gap year and I go nowhere. And I haven't posted anything on it yet, but because I don't do anything or go anywhere. So it's going really well so far. So what is arts management? That's a good question. All right, well, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna explain it the way that it has been explained to me because I don't think that it's a very simply put major and I don't think that I even fully grasp what it is I was going to study for when I picked my program. It's basically a business degree with like a lens focus on the arts. Arts management is an academic field of study as well as a career path for those interested in supporting the work of performing visual and media artists. The curriculum of arts management includes studies in strategic planning, fundraising, grant writing, programming, special event planning, audience development, volunteer management, board development, financial management and arts policy. So you might have no idea what that means. And honestly, like before I went to college, I didn't know what any of those words meant. So what I will say about this degree is that it's not super common. I think that there's like a handful of undergraduate programs in America for it. There's a lot of master's programs for it. So when you're searching for arts management schools, that can be sort of challenging because a lot of the times MA programs show up and that's not helpful. What I find appealing most appealing about the major is the flexibility of it. This is so hard to explain. I'm so bad at explaining things. Okay, it's a very like craftable major. I don't okay, please stay to the end of this video because I swear to God, I'm going to make it make sense. The easiest way for me to explain it is to talk credits. So if you don't know, because I didn't know this really going looking at schools, I mean, not like really like I think I like heard it, but I didn't really like understand what it meant. So when you're getting your degree, you have to hit a certain amount of credit hours for your, you know, if you're going to a liberal arts school, which if you're studying arts management, it's most likely going to be a liberal arts school. So you have to fill your like buckets. So I want to put put buckets up here. Okay, so you have to fill your general studies bucket. Okay. And then over here, you have to fill your major bucket. And then in a bigger bucket, you have to fill up your degree credit hours. So at the College of Charleston, you have to have 122 institutional credit hours to graduate. What that means is you don't get your degree until you've completed that number. Pretty much one class is usually about three credits. And you take you can take up to 18 credits a semester at the College of Charleston. So it adds up really fast. So I am going to be a junior next year and I already have how many credits do I have? Okay, so I have 70 credit hours and I've only completed two years of school so far. I'm just going to speak specifically to the College of Charleston. So the arts management degree at CFC is 45 credits up here in this bucket, right? And your general studies is going to be about like 30 plus credits. And this is 45 plus too. It really just like kind of depends on you, but that's like pretty much the basic number. So in order to complete those two buckets, it's like 75 credits total. I already have 70 credits and I'm a sophomore. So the best thing about the arts management degree is its flexibility. So if you're really like looking at it, like I know that this this part's like annoying, like it's if this is boring, you don't want to hear about this. But that's two years of school right there. And you have a major done you have your general studies done. So you have all of these free credits to do whatever you want with them. So that's what I really love about the program. So I'm going to speak specifically to me. So I am I am not a double major. A lot of people choose to be double majors. So there's a lot of room. I mean, it definitely depends on like how heavy your other major is. And it requires some planning. But it's definitely worth it because you get to sort of like design your college experience. So for me, I really enjoyed taking creative writing when I was a kid. And I took it like my senior year of high school. And I was just like, Oh, this is so cool. This is so fun. I want to take this in college. I need to figure out a way to do it. And it was really easy because I have all of this space in my schedule. So I'm a creative writing minor. But you should also know about me is before I went to college, my goal has always been to study abroad for a full year. So even before I was like looking at colleges, like I was always looking at study abroad programs, because I just knew that that was just something that like I had to have like that was I was going to I was going to make it happen. I was going to manifest it. So because I have all of this basically like two years of free space, I got to add a major. I got to pick the major I wanted the minor I wanted to finish my general studies and take a year off to not off like, you know, to study abroad, because that was something that like I really wanted just like for my life, you know. But if I didn't study abroad, you know, I could have filled that year with like a, you know, a communications minor or a or dropped my creative writing minor and, you know, been a music major. I don't know, I'm making this up because I would fail as a music major though. So what classes will you be taking? So you're going to be taking introduction to arts management, strategic planning in the arts, arts, financial management, I'm going to stop counting in my hands, fundraising, policy in the arts, financial accounting, and then two sections of economics. So I have finished all of my accounting and economics. And let me tell you that is probably one of the biggest things that I didn't think about when choosing this major is because I was like, oh, like high school, like I'm so bad at math. I hate math. My whole pre program is math. And the math does not end. I will say that. There's a lot of math. There's math because you make budgets. I still have a financial management class I have to take. So I'm assuming there's gonna be math with that. So just know that like there is, it's not bad because like I did it and I was so bad at math in high school. Like I hated every single minute of it. It was so bad. I got through it. I mean, it wasn't like, I didn't go to economics every day, like skipping and being like, yay, this is the best thing ever. But you know, you can you can do it like you get through it. Okay, so then you also take classes in like legal aspects of the entertainment industry. You take a class in marketing, understanding creativity, which was one of my favorite classes. So then also with your degree at the College of Charleston, you take nine credit hours in like pretty much an arts discipline. So that's probably the best part of my major too, and why I've been able to like study abroad for a whole year, because these credits also overlap with my minor. So like they have credits in like art history. So if you want to be an art history minor or major, it crosses over dance, English, oh, historical preservation. CUC has a great program for that. It's actually I wish that I could have taken a class in that like, it sounds really, I've heard it's really interesting music. So if you want to be a music major and theater, so any of those majors, they'll sort of overlap and you can get credits that way. With, with planning and understanding of like your credit hours, you can like really take control of your college experience, which I just think is like the best part of it. So the other thing with arts management is that you get to take an internship within your program. So it like counts towards your degree, which I think is really cool. I have done so many internships at this point. And being in Charleston, I will say has its perks, because it is like the city is literally crawling with arts organizations that need interns, which is really awesome because I've had some really cool experiences working with like local artists. I've worked on a film set, filming like a festival. Yeah, you can actually have another video. I mean, like it's really a bad quality video, but it has some good information on like how to get an internship. I'll link it up in a card or down below. Yeah. And then I think just talking like from, from the media, I haven't literally no idea what I want to do when I grow up, like not one clue. And I think that this major is really it lends itself to you not knowing what you want to do, because it's like, it's pretty broad. You get, you know, good practical skills that you get to take, you know, from your degree. It's something interesting that you're passionate about, I would say go for it. I know I talked a lot about the College of Charleston in this video, but there are schools that offer this major everywhere. So, but you, they're not like, they're not super easy to find. So I would say like when you're looking at colleges, like go into schools, catalogs and see if they have either like arts management or arts administration. Those are the two terms that they're going to be under. And that's not something that I knew beforehand. So I know that when I was applying to schools, I think it was like the University of Kentucky had it and a school in Ohio, but our University of Maine at Farmington. So there's, there's programs at everywhere. There's a lot of places. Oh, I think Drexel has it in Philadelphia. Look, just like kind of look around. It's not, it's not so easily found like online. So you sort of have to, you sort of have to dig, but I definitely think it's worth it. Also, there are a lot of ways that you can sort of replicate a major at other schools. Like maybe you want to take, you know, like a minor in marketing and, you know, a business management degree, but then you also take, you know, courses in a creative field. Like I think that there's, there's room for interpretation. A school like CFC has a very like fine tuned program list because it's like been long established as a bachelor's program. So I think that's what you're, you're gonna get more like a fine tuned course list that are like cohesive and sort of like go together. But it's definitely something that you can replicate similar like vibes at another school if you wanted to, if CFC is not for you or like college. There's a lot more room for interpretation than I was, that was like initially led on because it seems like most of the time when you're at college fairs and stuff, like they're talking about like biology majors and, you know, engineering. And like I am not that or like communication. Like those, those are very large majors that will take you four years to complete. But there are these sort of majors out there where it's like a little bit more like moldable and a little bit more, a little more creative. You see what I did there? Okay, so yeah, leave your questions below. I'm really happy to try and answer as many as I can. So I'm gonna give this video a like so people can find it and hopefully it will help them if they're looking into this program, because I think it's a really cool major and I really like college because of it. So yeah, thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.