Becoming a Hairstylist by Kate Bolick

Author:Kate Bolick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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OSLYN FINISHED SCHOOL IN September 2016. “It was sort of a letdown, actually!” he says. “Very abrupt. There’s no graduation day or anything. Because people are enrolled on a rolling basis, you don’t even know who is finishing when. You literally just hit your one thousandth hour, down to the second, and they’re like, ‘Cool, you’re done, good luck, ’bye.’ ”

Oslyn’s next step was to take the licensing exam. The exam is in two parts—a written test and a practical portion—and you must do them on different days. Because it can take a long time to get your test dates, graduates are given a temporary certificate of completion that lasts only six months—just enough to show a potential employer that you’re legit, and to leave you enough time to confirm your dates. Even though Oslyn went online to make his appointment the very day school ended, the soonest one he could get was seven months later, in April 2017. “You never know when they’ll happen, so I recommend staying on top of that,” he says.

In New York, the exams are held in convention centers and schools around the city, always in a different place. His would be at the New York State Licensing Center, in Chinatown. It cost $15 to sign up.

The day of Oslyn’s written exam was one of the first warm days of spring, but incredibly windy. He’d made sure to study, using the flash cards he’d relied on during school, and felt very well prepared. Technically, there can be a question about any word used in the Milady textbook, on any topic. Even though Oslyn’s focus was on hair, he also had to be ready to answer questions about nail health, makeup, and skincare.

The exam began at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. He arrived early. “It was a little intimidating, and everything was gray and dull,” he said. “There were probably one hundred and fifty people in a big room waiting to take the test. Everyone was nervous. I cracked jokes with a couple of people to break the tension.”

A few minutes before the exam started a proctor corralled everyone by last name into a giant test room. “It was the biggest test classroom you could have,” he recalls. Because a lot of people there don’t speak English as their first language, the proctors take time helping the students fill out all the necessary identification information.

“The girl sitting behind me was there taking the exam for the third time,” Oslyn remembers. “That made me really sad. I could tell she was passionate and really wanted to do it, but something wasn’t clicking for her. She probably just wasn’t good at succeeding in a dry testing environment.”

The exam is one hundred “rapid-fire, no-frills” questions, multiple choice. Like any standardized test, you fill in the bubbles with a #2 pencil. You have an hour to take it. It took Oslyn about twenty minutes. When he finished, he made sure to double-check that he’d filled in all the bubbles.

The exam is pass/fail; you need to answer at least seventy out of one hundred questions correctly.

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