The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University

• How do I go about requesting a specific teacher?  And what happens if I change my mind later in the process?

   

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Matching you with a private teacher is an important part of the admissions process. To be effective we need input from both you and the faculty. We would like to be able to match every student with his or her teacher of choice. At the same time, studio openings for a given year vary, so considerable deliberation goes into the process. 

The first step is to gather information from you, and from the faculty. The on-line application has a place for you to give us a first and a second choice of teacher. You also have a “no preference” option. Selecting “no preference” is wise if you are not familiar with our faculty, or if you just can’t cope with making a teacher selection that early in the process. You can revise or add a selection before your audition. Just let us know in writing. For the record, the teachers won’t learn of your preference until after auditions have ended, so as long as you revise your choice(s) by a week before that time, the faculty will only see the most recent information.

After auditions, teachers have two weeks to come up with list of acceptable applicants for their studios. The lists go to the enrollment management committee, which spends the next six days trying to make sense of it all. If the teacher you requested as first choice wants to teach you, the committee will make that match. Otherwise the committee will go to the second choice. If neither choice is available, or if “no preference” is still shown, the committee looks for a teacher who was especially enthusiastic about your audition.

You can change your teacher preference information between the day of your audition and the beginning of the committee meetings. The committee will operate with the new information. The difference is that your change of request must be visible in our records, in case (for instance) your original first-choice teacher wonders how you came to be assigned to another faculty member. Typically there is no problem, though, so we encourage you to update your request if you have a change of heart. 

It would be great if the teacher selection saga ended there, but for a few applicants there is another chapter. We are aware that applicants tend to shift in their feelings toward specific schools during the application and audition process. So, let’s suppose it is mid-April, all the responses from all the colleges have arrived, and you find yourself thinking more and more about attending Peabody. You go to your private teacher, who agrees that Peabody would be a good school for you, except s/he thinks you should study with a different teacher than the one to whom you have been assigned.

Now what!

Even after all is said and done, we will do our best to assign you to the teacher of your choice. We will check to see if that teacher responded well to your audition, and still has an available opening. We will also need to notify the teacher to whom you were originally assigned. In truth, even after you start school at Peabody you can change teachers. It only happens with maybe five students each year, and these are situations where (after a reasonable getting acquainted period) teacher and student agree that things are not working out. Everyone wins when a student and teacher are enthusiastic about the progress being made, so we do everything possible to ensure that outcome.