On Thursday March 10, hundreds of Elon University students will print their resumes, iron their best business casual shirts and march confidently into Alumni Gym for the annual spring Job and Internship Expo hosted by the Student Professional Development Center (SPDC).

But musical theater students take a slightly different approach.

For most students across majors and intended career paths, their job search will be a combination of job fairs, networking and submitting applications.

Senior music theater major Jillian Hannah has been around the job search block a few times, and each time she has used a range of methods, each quite similar to those used by business or communications students.

During the last weekend of February, for example, Hannah and the other seniors in her major hosted agents and casting directors here at Elon — a senior tradition. The group has been raising money throughout the academic year to cover hotel and travel costs for these professionals. They spent the weekend networking and auditioning with them in small groups.

Hannah has seen the results of this opportunity in the past.

“This is how people get signed by agents and start a relationship with these casting directors that we’re going to be auditioning for [for] the rest of our careers,” she said.

The method is more about meeting people and making an impression than it is about getting an interview right away. For summer work, students have found success in events at the Southeastern Theatre Conference, hosted March 2-6 in Greensboro. Conferences like this one happen across the country during the spring semester, bringing together young music theater students for auditions with regional theaters looking to put together a cast for their summer lineup.

Junior Dan Lusardi has experience with this kind of performance job search.

“You go in and you sing like 10 seconds of a song and 30 seconds of a monologue, and whoever likes you will ask you to come back to a smaller hotel room and have you do more stuff or just talk to you,” Lusardi said. “It really is a bizarre thing. You try to do the funniest or most dramatic 20 seconds of a monologue and then they time you out and you leave. It’s very strange.”

Bizarre or not, it is not far off from the five minutes a student might spend with a recruiter at the SPDC job expo. Where young journalism professionals might bring along a small portfolio of their published work, music theater students go to these conferences with a portfolio of their own: a collection of monologues and songs they know well. 

The student will carefully select a combination of these pieces, always keeping in mind which theaters are represented in the audition room at a given time.

“You’ve got to take into account what shows they’re doing,” Lusardi said, “You want to pick material that either can make them see you in a specific show or in a range of shows. You try to sort of style yourself for their style of season.”

Theaters usually put out a few shows they put on during the summer season, and try to look for a cast that can do all of the shows. This means the young professionals are exposed to a range of roles, but it also means a good relationship with a theater one summer does not guarantee a position there the year after. 

While students in other fields may have years to build a resume that will land them their dream job at a specific company, music theater students face more uncertainty about where they will work.

“I definitely have my sights set higher this year,” Lusardi said. “But it’s such an uncertain job field, it’s really hard to set such high goals for that because you don’t know what theaters are looking for, what sort of people they need.”

After theaters release their summer lineup, they hold multiple rounds of auditions both locally and at the regional conference level. Sometime between mid-March and early April, they start releasing their final decisions.

“It’s just basically audition after audition,” Hannah said. “You have to go to all of these things, and then you go to the callbacks, if they call you back. And then you wait. It’s really unfortunate, a lot of the time you only hear if you got a ‘yes’. So it’s kind of like this huge waiting game. It can get really stressful, especially if everybody else around you is hearing.”

Good news for Hannah, though — her waiting game is mostly over. She has already received a job offer for summer theater work, but will attend a few more auditions before committing to anything. Then from August to January, she will work at Disney as part of their college program.

Though it is surely a weight off of her shoulders, Hannah’s happiness is understated.

“It’s very rare to know what you’re doing for the next six months, so it’s very nice,” she said.