Golden Gargoyles is one outlet at Booth that allows students to express themselves creatively. Whether it’s acting, directing, screen-writing, or dancing, Golden Gargoyles gives everyone the opportunity to showcase their talents and contribute to a fun event that signifies the official end of LEAD. In this week’s TBE post, first-year student Ying Liu recounts all of the highlights of the evening and what it was like to star in her cohort’s video. For photos of the event, check out Photobooth’s Flickr album.
What an amazing evening! After 3 months, I’m still constantly surprised by the diversity and talent of Booth students. As a first-year student (I’m from Seattle and have a background in management consulting), I expected to meet lots of smart, driven, and talented people at the BusinessWeek #1-ranked business school (we just repeated this accolade for the 4th time in a row!), but as I found out at Golden Gargoyles, there’s a lot more to us than our smarts.So what is Golden Gargoyles? It’s Booth’s version of the Golden Globe Awards; the show is entirely produced, written, and performed by students to showcase the first years’ cohort films. Each of the 10 first year cohorts created a 6-minute video highlighting our first few months’ experience at school. This year’s films ranged from spoofs of TV shows and movies to music videos to musicals covering topics as wide as recruiting, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), LEAD class, and case competitions. Prior to Golden Gargoyles, the first year class watched the videos and voted on the Viewer’s Choice award. The remaining category winners were selected by the “critics” (our second-year LEAD facilitators) and awards were presented at Golden Gargoyles on Saturday, November 17.
As typical of awards ceremonies, there were beautiful hosts dressed in sparkly gowns and skits and performances scattered throughout the evening. We saw acts by a live band, comedy skits, lots of singing, a full on dance performance by our local PSY (impersonator) to “Gangam Style”, and even an opera performance! These shows were all organized and performed by first- and second-year Booth students, which leads me back to my first comment of this post: I am constantly amazed at the wide array of talent and diversity present in our class. Everyone has a hidden talent. For example, I knew the opera singer taught Zumba classes in her spare time, but I didn’t realize she could also SING. The admissions team really does an amazing job of putting together a diverse group of people from around the world who probably bring every talent/skill you can think of to Chicago.My favorite video of the night was the Walker cohort’s video, which was a spoof on “The Office”. The acting and editing team did a really great job of making the film look and feel like The Office. They took home both the Viewer’s Choice and the Best Film awards. Of course, my cohort’s film, the Gargoyles’ rendition of “The Little Mermaid”, was pretty amazing as well, and having starred in our video, I kept getting comments all week leading up to Golden Gargoyles from people whose main question was, “how did you manage to fit inside a dryer?!”. We were nominated in the categories of “Best Musical” and “Best WTF Moment” (for the dryer scene).
Golden Gargoyles has been one of the best events of the year and I’m so glad to be a part of such a vibrant and talented community at Booth!
