Lauren Holmes

Lauren Holmes is a theatre arts minor.

What are you studying at Pitt?
I’m studying English & theatre at Pitt—my major is in English writing and my minor is in theatre arts with a focus in lighting!
 
How do you see your theatre education contributing to your future goals?
I see my theatre education contributing to my future goals in that it’ll give me more options to teach in my areas of passion at a collegiate level after graduate school. Since coming to Pitt, I’ve discovered that I want to be a professor—I want to teach others in the areas of study that I love, which include English and theatre! Minoring in Theatre Arts will allow me to pass on my passion to future generations.

Is there a research opportunity, production, internship, class, etc. that has been instrumental to your time at Pitt or in helping you form your post-graduation goals?
Two classes that I took last semester have really made a particular impact on me—Intermediate Fiction (a writing class with Prof. Anjali Sachdeva) and Contemporary Global Stages (a theatre class with instructor Victoria LaFave). These classes were significant to me because the writing class solidified to me that I was in the right major, and the theatre class introduced me to the idea of a theatre arts minor, which I decided to partake in by the end of the semester! It was in these two classes as well that my internal dialogue switched from “if I were a professor, I would do this the same/differently” to “when I’m a professor, I will do this the same/differently,” which I took as a sign! In addition, attending the USITT annual conference in Baltimore solidified to me that I should focus my theatre studies in lighting.

A crazy scavenger hunt at the conference convinced me I was on the right path.  All of us Pitt students collaborated and worked together to complete a bunch of random tasks set by the event organizers, which resulted in us gaining 30,500 points by the end of the week and winning the scavenger hunt competition! We won a lot of cool USITT gear, and also five of us won free admission for next year’s conference! The funny part about that story, though, is that we started off the competition by adding all 15 of us students onto one scavenger hunt team—which apparently wasn’t allowed, and after gaining over 4,000 points in the first night and blasting past most of the other teams competing, we got called out at the opening ceremony by some important USITT people! It was all in good fun, though—they just took a moment to go on stage and say “hey, by the way, teams for the scavenger hunt are only meant to consist of up to five people…” and then looked directly at us in the crowd and said “I’m talking to you, Pitt students!!” It was quite funny, and we all got a laugh out of it, and we narrowed our team down to five people and STILL won!! Definitely a memory I won’t soon forget!

What do you hope to do when you graduate?
I hope to go on to graduate school and get my doctorate so I can become a professor myself!