Guiding a 21-Year-Old With a 2023 DAE Grade B Planning a Filmmaking Bachelor’s Abroad in 2028
The pasta pot was still sitting on the stove, half-full of cold water, when my 21-year-old son Jai turned his phone around to show me a screenshot of entry requirements for one of his top-choice UK film schools. “They don’t even list minimum DAE scores here,” he said, picking a crumb of leftover garlic bread off the kitchen counter. “What if my B from 2023 is automatically going to knock me out before they even look at my work?”
Two years ago, when his DAE results came back, we sat at this same counter and had a very different conversation. He’d originally planned to apply to film programs abroad that same cycle, but his B was lower than the minimum most schools posted publicly, and he only had three rough student shorts shot on a friend’s phone to his name, no real on-set experience. He could have crammed to retake the exam the next year and applied again in 2024, but he shook his head. If he was going to spend the time and money to get a degree abroad, he wanted to apply with a portfolio he was proud of, enough savings to avoid crippling debt, and a clear idea of what kind of films he wanted to make. 2028 entry, he said, that gave him five years to get it right.
For the last two years, that’s meant four 8-hour shifts a week at the small indie cinema downtown, where he sells tickets, cleans projector lenses, and helps run the free youth film workshop on Saturdays. He leaves his beat-up DSLR and a wobbly tripod propped against the dining room table, and I trip over it at least once a week when I’m grabbing cereal in the morning. He brings home salted popcorn left in the concession stand after closing, and most nights he edits on his laptop on the couch while I watch old crime shows. It’s not the linear college track most of his friends took, but it’s working for him so far.
A lot of parents from our old school district have asked me what we’re doing to plan, since their kid also got a lower exam score and wants to study a creative field abroad on a slower timeline. The first thing I tell them is we didn’t hire an expensive admissions consultant right off the bat. The first concrete thing we did was email every program Jai is interested in, directly to the admissions office, last year. We wrote a short, clear note: 21-year-old applicant, received DAE Grade B in 2023, currently building a portfolio of documentary work, planning to apply for 2028 entry, can you confirm if this grade meets your eligibility requirements? Out of the four we emailed, three said that for applicants with professional or personal creative experience, the portfolio makes up 80% of the decision, and the B is more than enough to be eligible. One said we’d need to add a 1-year foundation course before the bachelor’s if he still has that grade when he applies, which we just added to the 2027 timeline. No guesswork, no panicking about whether the grade is a dealbreaker years down the line. Just ask.
We didn’t map every single day for five years—that’s impossible, and it would have turned his passion into a chore. But we broke the timeline into 6-month chunks, with one small, clear goal for each chunk. For the first 6 months, it was save $2,000 and shoot one 5-minute short. For the next, it was assist on one local production and complete a basic sound design course. We have a 10-minute check-in once a month, usually after Sunday brunch, just to go over what’s done, what’s not, and adjust if something comes up. When Jai got offered more hours at the cinema a few months back, we shifted the next short back by three months, no big deal. The check-ins keep him from drifting, but they’re not so formal that they feel like homework.
We also skipped the $3,000 summer pre-college film programs in New York or London that a lot of people push for aspiring filmmakers. Instead, Jai started volunteering extra hours at the cinema’s youth workshop, which put him in touch with a local documentary filmmaker working on a project about family farms in our region. He asked if he could assist her for free, just to get experience, and she said yes. He spent three weekends last fall hauling gear, logging footage, and doing second camera work, and he got a credit on the finished film that will go straight on his application. That experience taught him more than any condensed summer course could have, and it cost him nothing but gas money. I also started matching 50% of whatever he puts into his dedicated school savings account, instead of buying him random birthday or Christmas gifts. That’s added up faster than I expected, and it means he’ll graduate with way less debt than if we took out full loans.
Last month, Jai had a bad week. He showed the filmmaker his latest short, about the 80-year-old owner of the downtown used bookstore, and she told him the editing pacing was off, that the story got lost in the second half. He came home, threw his backpack on the couch, and said he was wasting five years, that he should just apply to local business school like his cousin did and get it over with. I didn’t give him some big speech about following his dreams. I just put the kettle on, pulled out the chocolate biscuits we keep in the pantry, and when he calmed down, we looked at the plan together. We adjusted: he signed up for a 10-week online editing course taught by a professor at one of his top-choice schools, it’s $400 out of his school fund, and it starts next month. That’s it. No big crisis, just a small step forward.
Right now, Jai is re-editing the bookstore short, his savings are just over $14,000, and we’re meeting that filmmaker for coffee next week to go over his new cut. No one knows what’s going to happen in 2028. He might not get into his top choice, he might decide he likes making small local films enough that he doesn’t need a bachelor’s degree abroad, he might even switch to studying something else entirely. That’s okay. Five years is a long time, and people change. What we’ve done so far works: we’ve taken the big, scary goal of getting into filmmaking school abroad and turned it into a bunch of small, doable steps, we checked the grade thing early so we’re not panicking closer to application time, and we adjust when things go wrong. It’s not the fast, straight path most people take, but it’s his. And that’s as much as any of us can plan for.
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