When Scholarships Require an Audition

Lindley Davis

We are bringing our School of Music into BAM for 2021-2022. Their current scholarship process is very unique. I would love to hear from system and opportunity admins who have departments that require an audition in order to receive a scholarship. If you have any suggestions or strategies that have worked for your school (or tips on what to not do!), please let me know. (Do you extend an invite to audition through BAM based on a conditional application? Do you keep the application process separate and just award through BAM? Etc)


Thank you!

Shawndi Wilson

The audition process is outside of BAM at my school. We only make the awards through BAM.

Kim Hiltner

Here's what we do but I'd like to hear other ideas:

We list our music scholarships (mostly apply-to) in BBAM, and each one directs students to apply for the appropriate music scholarships in BBAM and to also submit a single audition application found on the department’s webpage (we provide a link to that in BBAM). The auditions are completed before the scholarship application deadline. During auditions, faculty suggest to students which scholarships they should apply for in BBAM (to be considered and does not mean they'll receive). Occasionally I am asked to manually apply a student to a particular scholarship so that it can be offered. Awards and post-acceptance are done through BBAM.

Erin Callicott

We are using BBAM's faculty reference to our Music faculty to trigger the audition requests from students as part of the requirements. Once a student applies to the apply-to scholarship and sends in the faculty reference to the Music faculty, the Music faculty will contact the student to make an audition appointment. From there, the Music faculty has the audition and completes the faculty reference questionnaire specifically crafted for their use to take notes and judge the student applicants' auditions. They will then submit the references/audition review notes via BBAMs faculty reference request, which will pull the applicant over into a qualified applicant pool. Once the application period is over, the Music faculty will review all references/audition notes and additional student information then choose their finalists for the scholarship.


Next Fall will be the first time we attempt this new process. I'll come back and share how that goes for us.

Lindley Davis

Thank you so much, Erin!

Lindley Davis

Thank you, Kim. We may look into something along these lines.

Lindley Davis

Thanks, Shawndi! We will likely start this way as we explore other options for the future. Glad to know we arent' the only ones!

Lisbeth Fernandez

@Erin Callicott Hi Erin! I know it's been two years since this post but I wondered how did it go with the new process? We are looking to do something similar at UCF and were wondering if it worked! Thank you, Lisbeth