Think you could design a building like this one? Maybe you can, after some lessons from the man who designed it (Frank Gehry). Want to play tennis like Serena Williams or cook like Gordon Ramsay? Be as funny as Steve Martin? Act as well as Kevin Spacey or Dustin Hoffman? If you want to try, how about hearing these stars’ tricks of the trade in their own words?

In 1920, textile merchant Augustus D. Juilliard bequeathed a large amount of money for the advancement of music in the United States. The Juilliard Foundation led to the creation of the Juilliard School in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, New York City. It is now the most prestigious music school in the world. Competition for admissions is fierce: in 2012, 2,657 undergraduate applications were received by the School and 191 were accepted. Tuition fees are $48,670 per school year.

Which courses are the most intellectually stimulating? If you ask this question to teachers and students of various subjects, you’re bound to get biased answers. After all, those people are in their chosen fields because they found them interesting in the first place. Unless they are doing it because they have to – more on that later.

Bad games can either make you throw your controller at the screen or inspire you to design better ones. If you think you can do better or are just interested in making games, a game design course like that offered by School of Game Design is one way to go to acquire the necessary skills. Game design isn’t producing a polished product, but sketching out the rules and strategies of games at the pre-production stage.

If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, studied philosophy at college. Astute viewers will have noted the many references to philosophy in the show – Homer, for one, is so named as a nod to a great thinker (but he thinks it comes from baseball). Critics have noted for a long time that the show does more than merely play with philosophy. Rather than mentioning clever stuff in passing to show its creator’s erudition, the Simpsons actually does philosophy.