JAB’s major event is perhaps one of the biggest happenings each year on Juniata’s campus.  Last year students flooded into the Kennedy Center to see We the Kings and Black Violin.  This year students were happily surprised to see that Chris Webby and The Dean’s List had been chosen to perform on campus in March.  Senior Lucia Cappiello, JAB’s major event chair, discusses the process of bringing a big artist to a small campus.

Q: How did you get the position of JAB’s major event chair?

A: There’s an application process. This year they’re doing interviews but in the past it was just based of your application and any previous experience you had.  Last year I was the assistant chair, and it set me up to be the chair this year.

Q: This year for the major event, students were voting for an artist at the beginning of the year.  Why did you decide to pick an artist this way?

A: It wasn’t exactly a vote; it was more just to see if that direction was okay because we hadn’t had hip-hop in the past three years.  We just wanted to make sure people were good with hip-hop.

The whole process for planning started last spring.  Some of those artists were in our price range at the time so they were originally options.  Because we were looking at artists who were up-and-coming they gained a lot more notoriety, so their price went up to a point out of our price range.

Q: How did you create this list of potential artists to have students choose from?

A: At the time last spring it was me and Rob Strauss as co-chairs, and we both thought that hip-hop was kind of the direction we wanted to take things in this year.  We were both looking at up-and-coming hip-hop artists that we knew of and those were the ones that we felt had the best opportunity.

Q: What does the process of getting someone famous to perform at Juniata involve?

A: We started off by making our list of who we wanted, and then we got in contact Ari Nisman, who’s the booking agent that the school uses. He then contacts the artists’ agencies and gets us the pricing information for them, and then once we have people who are in our price range we narrow our list down to the artists that we think would work best at Juniata. Then Ari contacts them again to see which artists are interested in coming and can work with our schedules.

Q: What preparations are going on now before the concert?

A: Now we’re trying to get all of the contracts finished up and getting our day-of schedule set up.  We’re setting up committees to help out with day-of activities and preparations for that.  We’re going to be meeting soon with conference and events and campus security and just getting everybody on-board for what’s going to happen that day.

Q: What are you finding most challenging in organizing the event?

A: The hardest part was trying to get artists within our price range.  After that things really haven’t been too big of an issue.  Once you get the artist it’s pretty easy from there on. The only other thing you have to worry about is ticket sales.  They started last week so they’re still working their way up.

Kelsey Molseed ‘14

Campus Opinions Online Reporter