How We Got Here

It was January 2024. My wife and I were in our bedroom. Our daughter had just gotten back from a trip to New York, where she’d seen a handful of shows over a long weekend. She came home quieter than usual, and we could tell something was going on. As parents, you know that feeling. You start wondering about worst-case scenarios. We kept gently asking, and she kept deflecting, and then finally she said it.

“I think I want to do musical theater.”

My wife handled it better than I did. My reaction was basically oh, shit. For years, I’d tell her “I don’t really care what you do, as long as it isn’t musical theater”. I was always joking about that - kind of.

That feeling lasted a few days. I did my best to hide it from her. like to think I mostly succeeded, but internally I was catastrophizing. Are we going to be supporting her forever? Is she ever going to be able to find work? I knew nothing about what a career in musical theater actually looked like, what the training path involved, or how the college application process even worked. Neither did my wife, honestly, even though she’s owned a performing arts studio for over twenty years. She’d never been through it herself or helped any of her students through it.

So I did what I do. I started researching.

My background is in robotics. I got my PhD from Carnegie Mellon, spent years building autonomous systems for defense applications, started a company, and eventually sold it. I teach a couple of classes at CMU each year, mentor some startups, and try to stay useful. None of that has anything to do with musical theater.

But it turns out that being completely outside the world you’re trying to understand has one advantage: you don’t assume you know things you don’t know. I came in with zero assumptions. I had to learn everything from scratch: what a prescreen was, what MTCP meant, why you’d apply to 20-30 schools when most people apply to 8. I had to understand what Unifieds were, and why families planned their entire winters around them.

I spent months absorbing all of it. I built a very large spreadsheet (which some of you have hopefully found useful). I tracked every school Annika was considering, every prescreen requirement, every deadline. I color-coded everything. I had sections for academic information, pre-screen information, auditions, financials, results. By the time we hit peak audition season, I had something that looked less like a spreadsheet and more like a command center.

It definitely helped me keep everything organized! But it was also, objectively, a mess.

Here’s what I noticed during that year: every family was doing the same thing we were doing. Building their own version of the spreadsheet. Piecing together information from Facebook groups (I spent way too much time on MT Parents), from Reddit, from word of mouth, from forums where the same questions got asked and answered over and over and over. There was no central place where the information lived. Every family started from zero.

That’s insane, when you think about it. This is a process that thousands of families go through every year. The information exists. The schools are the same schools. The prescreen requirements are documented. The deadlines are knowable. But every family was reinventing the wheel, because no one had put it all in one place.

I kept thinking: I could build this.

I spent my career building software to solve hard organizational problems. I know how to structure data, how to build interfaces that make complex information manageable. This is, in some ways, exactly what I do. So, once our daughter was settled into her program (and having the time of her life!) I started planning it and building it out.

That was the beginning of MyMT Manager.

I want to be clear about what MyMT is and what it isn’t.

It’s not a service that tells you where your kid should apply, or whether they have a shot at a particular program, or what songs they should be singing. It can’t replace the coaches and counselors who are actually good at that. What it does is take the organizational nightmare off your plate — the research, the tracking, the “wait, when is the prescreen due for that school?” — and put it somewhere you can actually find it.

The families who’ve been using it in beta have said variations of the same thing: it replaced a Google Sheet that had gotten completely out of control. That’s the problem it solves. Not the artistic problem, not the emotional problem, but the logistical chaos that runs underneath everything else during a year that is already hard enough.

If you’re just starting this process, I know how overwhelming it feels. You’re suddenly trying to understand an industry you’ve never been part of, a set of norms you weren’t raised in, a timeline that has no margin for error. And you’re doing all of that while watching your kid go through something that is deeply personal and often emotionally brutal.

I’ve been in that spot. I know what it’s like to sit in a hotel lobby at Unifieds at 11pm, scrolling Facebook groups trying to figure out if what just happened in the audition room was normal, trying not to text your kid who told you to stop texting.

This blog is where I’ll write about what I learned — and keep learning. Not as an expert in musical theater, because I’m still not that. But as a dad who went through this and came out the other side with some things worth sharing.

We’ll start from the beginning.