Since you're reading this, I'm going to assume that you want to find out more about majoring in musical theater in college. Well, what I would highly recommend to you is heading on over to the threads page, starting at PART 1, and reading all the way through to the current thread. It is quite a lot to get through, but I can guarantee that if you can get through all of it, you will have a wealth of information at your disposal that you will be absolutely unable to get anywhere else. However, if you are looking for an answer to a specific question that is not answered on this site, or simply want to look and see what has been on the board about a certain topic, then you can use the College Confidential search function to do so.
USING THE SEARCH FUNCTION ON THE OLD FORUMS
- Go to the old College Confidential Message Board main page. (This link will open in a new window; when you click on it this page will stay open as well as bringing up the new page. That way you can continue following the instructions on here as you search.)
- On the left-hand side of the page, you will see a column of links. Click on the third link from the bottom, MESSAGE SEARCH.
- On the MESSAGE SEARCH page you will see four areas in which you can enter information about what to search for.
- In the SEARCH FOR: box, type in what you want to search for. If you place a + in front of a word, that word is guaranteed to be in every search result. If you place a - in front of a word, that word is guaranteed to not be in any search result. If you place a phrase in "quotes", then the engine will look for pages containing that exact phrase.
- In the SEARCH TOPIC: box, choose COLLEGE SEARCH AND SELECTION, if it is not already selected for you. This is the area in which every part of the discussion has taken place.
- In the LOOK IN: box, you have three choices. Do not choose SUBJECT LINES, because every part of the musical theater discussion has the title "Colleges For Musical Theater Major --- Part XX." If you are looking for something by a particular poster, select NAMES OF AUTHORS and be sure that you have put that poster's name in the SEARCH FOR: box. If you are searching for anything else, choose TEXT OF MESSAGES, as this will search the actual posts.
- In the TYPE OF PAGE: box, choose PAGES CONTAINING MESSAGES.
- Hit the PERFORM SEARCH button.
- A series of search results will come up. To go to the beginning of the thread that had a post that talked about what you were looking for, click on the name of the thread. To go directly to the post that talked about the information you were looking for, click on the word in the snippet underneath the name of the thread.
USING THE SEARCH FUNCTION ON THE NEW FORUMS
- Go to the new College Confidential Message Board main page. (This link will open in a new window; when you click on it this page will stay open as well as bringing up the new page. That way you can continue following the instructions on here as you search.)
- At the top of the page you will see a series of links placed horizontally in a navy blue topbar. Click SEARCH. A small box will appear. Click ADVANCED SEARCH, the very last link (and very last line of text).
- A page will come up giving you many options as how to define your search. Most of these fields are fairly self-explanatory, but the most important field to fill out is the SHOW RESULTS AS field in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Make sure that this field has POSTS selected. Otherwise, entire pages will come up instead of individual messages.
- After you have filled out all pertinent information, hit the SEARCH NOW button and you're ready to go!