The Spreadsheet From Hell

At the Pittsburgh Unifieds last year, I gave a talk about navigating the MT application process. At one point I asked the room how many people had built “the big spreadsheet.” Almost every hand went up.

I’d spent eight years as a CEO before this. I know how to organize information and how to think through competing requirements and build systems that don’t fall apart under pressure. When my daughter decided she wanted to pursue a BFA in Musical Theater, I went into project manager mode almost immediately. I built the spreadsheet and I was confident it would be enough. And it was, but just barely.

Here’s what I didn’t understand going in: this isn’t one process. It’s five or six overlapping processes running simultaneously, each with its own timeline, its own requirements, and its own particular way of creating anxiety at 11pm.

There’s the academic application process: Common App, supplemental essays, transcripts, test scores, and letters of recommendation - all the stuff that goes into a “normal” college application. If that’s all there was, our daughter would have handled it and we would have largely stayed out of it.

Then there’s the MT-specific layer on top of it: prescreens, auditions, and artistic applications that are completely separate from academic ones. Schools that use Acceptd, schools that have their own portals, schools that want materials uploaded one way and other schools that want them another way entirely. Prescreen videos that have to be framed differently for different schools - waist up for this one, full body for that one, 30 seconds for the monologue here, 60 seconds there.

And then there’s the financial layer. FAFSA. CSS Profile. Merit scholarships, talent scholarships, academic scholarships; some of which you apply for automatically, some of which require a separate application, some of which have their own deadlines that have nothing to do with the admissions timeline.

Of course, all of this is happening at the same time, while your child is handling the normal pressures of being a senior in high school and the anxiety of figuring out their future.

My spreadsheet ended up with four tabs, each one earning its existence.

The main tracker was the master list: 30+ schools across a sprawling grid. The academic section alone had columns for which portal the school used (not all of them are on Common App - some have their own, some have a separate artistic portal on top of the academic one), whether to submit SAT scores, the SAT code, whether score choice was allowed, submission status for the academic application, and the date it was actually submitted.

Then the prescreen section: the due date, the songs and monologues she’d be submitting, the framing that was required, and whether she passed. Then auditions: dates, locations (on-campus, unifieds, etc), and when we’d expect an artistic decision.

Then decisions: artistic admit, academic admit, decision date. Then financials: estimated annual cost of attendance, academic scholarship, artistic scholarship, net. And at the far end, a notes column for pros and cons: actual observations from visit days and auditions, coach feedback, gut feelings about fit.

The color coding was its own system. Green for schools we’d decided to apply to, red for schools she’d decided to pass on, and then the cells themselves tracking status — submission complete, accepted, waitlisted, withdrew application. Watching that grid evolve from a blank list of possibilities in the summer to a color-coded map of outcomes by February was, in its own way, one of the more vivid documents of the whole year.

The second tab was scholarships: a cleaner summary pulling just the financial columns, because by the time you’re comparing real offers you don’t want to scroll through 33 columns to find the number that actually matters. Estimated attendance cost, academic scholarship, artistic scholarship, net. That tab exists because comparing offers across schools is its own analytical exercise, and you need to be able to see the numbers side by side without all the other noise.

The third tab tracked what I called “PUA Opportunities”: schools that had offered direct audition opportunities or early prescreen acceptances through Pittsburgh Unifieds. Each one had a point of contact name and email, their current status in that pipeline, and next steps. When a school director hands you a card at a Unifieds event and says “submit here and I’ll make sure it gets reviewed,” you need a place to track that conversation, because three months later you will not remember what they said or what you agreed to do.

The fourth tab was audition specifics: a row for every live audition scheduled, with columns for school, date, location, what songs she planned to perform and in what configuration (32-bar cut, 60 seconds, full verse and chorus), which songs she’d used in her prescreen so she could track what she’d already shown them, monologue selections, monologue lengths, whether there was a dance call, whether the school provided an accompanist or she needed a track, and any school-specific notes. Some schools want two contrasting songs, one before 1980, one after. Some want 16-bar cuts; some explicitly say don’t go longer or they’ll stop you mid-performance. Some want a classical monologue alongside a contemporary one. Some want materials that are different from what you submitted in your prescreen. The audition specifics tab was where I kept all of that from collapsing into one undifferentiated blur across seventeen different audition days.

There was a period in October and November where I was spending more time in my daughter’s email inbox than my own. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Prescreen confirmations, audition slot notifications, callback emails - all of it was flowing in, and it all needed to be processed and logged before anything fell through a crack.

She was focused on being ready to perform. That was her job. My job was making sure the infrastructure didn’t collapse.

I showed her the spreadsheet a couple of times, just so she’d have some sense of what was happening behind the scenes. I don’t think she fully understood the scope of it. That was probably fine, and she didn’t need to.

Here’s the thing I kept thinking as I built and maintained this monster: I have the skills to do this, and it’s still a really heavy lift. What’s happening in the houses where the parent doesn’t have a project management background? Where both parents are working full time and no one has hours to spend cross-referencing prescreen deadlines?

I’d go on the Facebook groups and see the same questions being asked over and over. “What are the prescreen requirements for [school]?” “Does [school] accept MTCP?” “When is [school]’s financial aid deadline?” Parents were piecing this together from memory, from other parents, from searching the same school websites I’d already searched. Every family was building their own version of my spreadsheet. Some were on their third revision. Some had given up on the spreadsheet entirely and were just trying to keep everything in their head.

There has to be a better way. That was the thought I kept coming back to. Not because my spreadsheet was bad - it worked, and I’ve shared it with others now - but because every family shouldn’t have to build one from scratch. The information is out there. It just isn’t organized anywhere.

That’s why I built MyMT Manager. It’s the spreadsheet, done once, done right, kept up to date, so you don’t have to do it yourself. The prescreen requirements are in there. The audition formats are in there. The deadlines, the portal links, the financial aid information - it’s all in one place, and it’s searchable.

If you’re reading this in August or September with a junior at home and a growing list of schools you’re not sure how to track, that’s what it’s for. It won’t replace the conversations or the coaching or the emotional work of this year. But it will get the organizational nightmare off your plate, so you can spend your energy on the things that actually matter.