Ryan Abbott
Theater
10 April 2009
Final Project

Relate Theater to your Major

Theater is an on stage performance that can relate to almost anything in life. My major is criminology; I am not exactly sure what I want to do with my major, but right now I am looking into law enforcement mostly at the FBI. Criminology in a basic definition is the study of crime, criminals, criminal behavior and corrections as an individual and social phenomenon. For a career you can go into many different directions. One could take an approach as a scientist and study crime (why people commit or do not commit crime). Most people who go to college to study criminology though look at law enforcement from a state trooper to a correctional officer in a prison. There is also a way into top government agencies with a criminology major ones you have probably heard of is the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), and ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). The Federal Bureau of Investigations top ten priorities are to “protect the United States from terrorist attack, protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage, protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes, combat public corruption at all level, protect civil rights, combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises, combat major white-collar crime, combat significant violent crime, support federal, state, local and international partners, and upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission.”
As you can see the FBI has a wide range of tasks to do. Having a theater class will help with this because in your life you have to have a wide range of different roles, and one of these roles could be to mislead people who want to harm others; whether it is people in this country, in other countries, or people trying to harm others through computers. In theater you have to take a role that is not you and get the audience to believe that is who you really are. In reality you could be a very nice caring person who would never hurt a fly, but you might have to get the people to believe that you are a jerk that went on a killing spree and is trying to avoid capture. To be good at this you have to change all aspects of who you are and have to be willing to do so. Some people are who they are and will not or can not change that so they could never have a chance in acting. To be in the FBI one might have to seem to be a drug dealer or some form of terrorist and get the actual criminal to believe him or her enough to do some kind of deal or get enough information against the criminal to be able to put them away in prison no questions asked.
To learn to be a good actor kind of means that you learned how to trick people in a certain way, this is not always a bad thing. To be some form of undercover agent is all about deception, you put your life on the line to get someone else to trust you enough so that they will do illegal things with you most likely with a hidden camera rolling.