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Engineers showcase talents in competition

ENGINEERING SOCIETY of UCLA
Members of UCLA’s Engineering Society are preparing for tonight’s “E-Week Idol,” a talent competition that showcases the group’s non-engineering skills and artistic endeavors. The event is part of Engineering Week.

By Alex Goodman

April 4, 2010 9:47 p.m.

There are people, undoubtedly, who believe that engineering and belly-dancing are mutually exclusive. But these are people who have never sat in the audience at the Engineering Society’s E-Week Idol, the talent competition that occurs tonight on the first night of Engineering Week.

The event has been something of a crowd-pleaser in the recent past, nearly filling Kerckhoff Coffee House the last two years.

“This year we’re moving to Kerckhoff Grand Salon,” said Derek Liu, internal vice president of the engineering society and a third-year electrical engineering student.

The change can make some contestants feel like a rock band finally breaking into the mainstream.

“It’s a bigger venue,” added Sarkis Khachatryan, a fifth-year computer science and mathematics student.

Khachatryan could certainly be considered for the figurative E-Week Idol Hall of Fame after he graduates; in the last three years, rapping under the name Sarkistic, he has twice taken second place, and once, two years ago, taken first.

“Sometimes it’s freestyle,” Khachatryan said, “but mostly I write my own lyrics to instrumentals that I pick out, any popular songs, and I add my own twist to it, whether it’s about student life, whether it’s about classes, whether it’s about the campus, whether it’s about different girls I meet on different parts of the campus. I try to make it so that a lot of people can relate to it, and I try to make it very UCLA-oriented, because we’re all UCLA people.”

According to Jeff McKay, the events chair for the Engineering Society and a fourth-year materials science and engineering student, eight other acts have signed up to challenge Khachatryan this year.

The acts will include unicycling, singing, accordion playing and a form of Chinese martial arts.

They will all compete for this year’s top prize, a $100 gift card to the UCLA store, though Khachatryan is not motivated by the fame and fortune.

“One of the things to keep in mind is that this is a fun event, No. 1,” Khachatryan said. “Sure, there’s some competition, but people don’t do it to win, people do it because they find this as a medium through which they express themselves, whether it’s a hidden talent or whether it’s a passion or whether it’s a hobby. It’s an event where they showcase those things.”

Liu feels that the showcase will work towards contradicting the stereotype that engineering students’ workload forces them to live like hermits.

“We have this E-Week Idol so we can show that engineers can do more than just study, of course,” Liu said. “There is that perception, and at a certain point we do study all the time, but everyone has their own little hobbies, and even though we are perceived that way, I don’t think (people will) be that surprised.”

And E-Week Idol is only a small part of the Engineering Week extravaganza. Many of the groups for which the Engineering Society is the umbrella organization ““ Liu estimates there are between 20 and 30 total ““ will be tabling throughout the week, attracting attention to the programs and opportunities the engineering school has to offer.

The other scheduled events include an ice cream giveaway this afternoon, a kid’s day Tuesday at Wilson Plaza, a book sale featuring donated engineering books on Wednesday, a candy giveaway on Thursday and a barbecue on Friday.

That final item is a source of pride for McKay.

“If you’ve heard about the food trucks over there (in the Court of Sciences),” McKay said, “Our stuff is going to be cheaper.”

But E-Week Idol could be a source of pride for engineers as a group, demonstrating to new audience members that they can, among other things, ride unicycles.

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Alex Goodman
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