The Eastward Trail to Yale by Melissa Rick Cochran, MFA, ‘81 Getting my Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Drama has meant the difference between being able to live by my ideals and having to betray them for the sake of survival. Electing to attend Yale was one of the best choices I ever made and I never take it for granted. The three-year-long experience was, itself, life changing; but the results of going there have continued to affect my family and me ever since. My being accepted to the program was a shock to a lot of people. I had a difficult time finding the guidance and direction I needed as an undergraduate in the Stanford University Drama Department. For that reason, I ventured beyond the opportunities on campus to get my needed theatre experience in the community. So, not many of the students or faculty members were aware of just how much work I was putting in as a stage manager. The opportunities added up for me and I was accepted to Yale in the spring of 1978. When they announced the future plans of all the graduates at the final departmental shindig, many jaws dropped when I was the only student who had gotten in to the famed Yale School of Drama! It was a very satisfying moment.
				Johnnie and Melissa Cochran. They are both involved in theatrical productions at Westmont College.
		The first year of the Technical Design and Production Program is deliberately grueling. If you can’t survive that first year of heavy academic and production work, you are unlikely to be able to tolerate life in the professional theatre. I finished that first year and returned in the fall to my second year as a new bride and newly pregnant woman. I was sure I would be encouraged to drop out but I couldn’t have been more wrong. By that time, I was one of the YSD family. Not only did the school make a teaching position available for my new husband, but at the news of my pregnancy, tears of joy came to the eyes of my advisor, and my schedule of second year production assignments was shaped in such a way as to have the most taxing physical work out of the way as soon as possible. At the end of that year, our son was born and would spend that spring and the next year growing in the arms of some of the most talented and creative theatre artists as they competed for his smiles. The real value of going to Yale came soon after I graduated. After three years of pouring my energy out to its limit between my graduate work, my marriage, and my son, I suspended the great job search for two years while we followed my husband’s career back to California to be closer to family. And we added the second of our three children to our fold. When life settled down enough for me to look around for work, I began by freelancing as a set designer. Design work was something I could do primarily at home, unlike stage managing which required long hours on site. I fell back on all the elective courses I had taken in lighting and set design, as well as my work study jobs as drafter and costume shop assistant. I wouldn’t stage manage again for fifteen years! I continued to freelance in design and began teaching theatre arts courses at Biola University in La Mirada, California. My degree from Yale and the job experience I had from Yale Repertory Theatre allowed me to spend most of my time involved in the lives of my children. I was able to earn more, spending fewer hours in the theatre because of the value of that degree. I home schooled my two older children until they entered third grade and have always been there to greet the children at the end of each school day. My degree has always been immediately and completely respected and valued; both at Biola and later at Westmont College. What going to Yale has meant to me has been the freedom to live out my ideals for my children and family while I enjoy a career as a theatre artist. And, as if that weren’t enough there has been and always will be the richness of the experience itself: rubbing elbows with talented visionaries, testing myself in an intensely creative and exhausting work environment, and the wealth I still carry in the relationships I have kept ever since.