Until the last few years, if you wanted to do theatre sound and get a degree or emphasis in audio, you had to make due in undergrad with special projects style courses and practical experience, and then apply to one of the theatre masters programs with an audio emphasis, or find a fine arts program that offered audio instruction. Sound is just beginning to be taught in general undergraduate programs as a mainstay of the curriculum, and it will be a long while yet before it's as basic as intro to lighting or costuming. In many ways, audio is still the "baby" of theatre fields, even though sound has been with theatre in one form or another since its inception.

Most folks who discover theatre in high school and know they want to do it or at least try it as a career go on to study in college. So with that said, if you want to be a sound designer, what do you do in undergrad to get started?

There is never one road to an end - and theatre is no exception to the rule. There are lots of ways to become a sound designer. A career in sound isn't a cake, so there's no set recipe, these are just a few pointers.

If you're just finishing high school and are one of the few who've already discovered audio and want to be a sound designer, the first step is finding a undergraduate program that offers sound - not only in it's curriculum, but in practical experience. There are lots of criteria to choosing a program - this is just one more point to add to the list.

If you're like most folks who discover audio while studying something else, you're already in as undergraduate program, which may or may not have a structured audio program. If it doesn't, you may want to consider transferring to one that does, or you may want to stay put if you have the opportunities at hand in the program you're already in. Either way, there are some basics I recommend from my own experience, as well as the paths my friends, coworkers, and employees have taken.

Talk to both your academic adviser AND a theatre adviser to help you with design your curriculum. Talk to other theatre students ahead of you and find out what they did that worked, and what mistakes they made. Don't just muck about in classes without direction.

Get involved. Know what your programs doing, and whats going on. If there's a theatre club, join it. Get involved in productions as soon as you can.

That said - learn to manage your time and your commitments. When I was starting out in college, I was balancing a full course load, a stage management stipend, a part time job, and working every production I could - never mind my social life. I wanted to work, so I took on every assignment anyone would give me - and ended up burning out and having some seriously embarrassing grades on my transcript. I ended up taking a lot of time off, and when I went back to school, taking a lot of classes over - a big waste of time and money. Involved yes. Over involvement, not so much. If you know you have a class with lots of outside work or homework, balance your other classes and your production involvement with that.

Every theatre department's guidelines for selecting student designers is different. If you're in a big program with graduate students, you may (as an undergrad) never do a main stage design - but that doesn't mean you can't design other student works or learn the process from professors and grad students. Get involved in productions as soon as you can - the sooner you're learning practically as well as academically - the better.

While you're in college - if you're not designing operate shows. Operation (even though it may just be a "go" button) is going to be the first gig you get as a sound tech. Best to have some proof you have and can do it.

While you're in college - work summer stock or do a summer internship. There can be lots of obstacles to this - summer school, parental expectations, school dates - but work through those obstacles. Summer stock is one of the best routes to professional experience - something you have to have to get a full time job. Best to do this while you can afford to!

If you have the opportunity to work outside your college theatre venue, be it in a local road house loading in shows, doing designs for a community theatre, operating or even interning with a local professional company, do, but within reason. Don't stretch yourself so thin you're not getting everywhere you need to be. Missing a class or two for something else is one thing - missing lots of class is another, especially if your school has attendance policies or if you're missing your classroom theatre training.

Understand the basics of electricity and sound waves. Even if your school doesn't teach an audio class, this ought to be covered in lighting. You can also pick it up in physics or electronics. Learn how to wire and solder. If your theatre program doesn't offer this, try the electronics department. They're skills worth having - especially since most professional sound designers are their own department heads.

Study music. Sing in a choir or learn an instrument if you don't already play one - piano, guitar, whatever. I'm not saying you have to be amazingly proficient or gifted, but playing or performing music is the best way to learn how to read music.

Take some music composition. One of my greatest shortfalls to being a sound designer is that I don't have any composition skills - something that would save me a lot of trouble when I need three bars of something for a scene transition.