I've just finished my first term at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. I am very pleased with the progress I am making. The feedback from my Lecturers is very positive yet gives me direction on where I need improvement. The two projects I've worked on this term have been Impro, a project on improvisation in the theatre, and Building a Character, a project where we delved deep into the lives of characters in a play to bring them to life in a showing at the end of term. I was very impressed with the teachings the tutors brought to the projects. In Impro, I learned some essential points to carry throughout the rest of my training and into my career as well. One point that rings in my ears is that one must be able to neither invent nor deny. An actor must stay open to instinct and impulses from those around him and within himself as well. In Building a Character, I learned to 'dirty it up'. Too often we look into the life of the character we've been cast as and we want to imagine the character's past as some idealistic image that in turn gives us, as actors, so little to work with when trying to make some sense of what we are doing in the performance space. I've gleaned a great deal of insight from my skills classes. I've been taking movement class, a class designed to help the actor become more comfortable in space and with his or her own body, voice class, designed to help me find the most effective voice that will aid my acting and encourage long-term healthiness of the vocal mechanism, singing class, building a repetoir of music and learning proper singing technique, a class on the Alexandre Technique, a class to encourage proper alignment and use of the spine, Voice fundamentals, a class that focuses on the make-up of the voice and the sound of dialects, Professional studies, a class where we learn about 'the business', Stage Combat, for armed and unarmed combat, Acting studies, where we learn about recent influential persons who made lasting impacts on theatre, and Theatre history, starting with the Greeks and moving forward. I am having a wonderful time in Wales and hope to continue in the following terms. Not that I anticipate that I won't.