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By Bryan Jefferson, ΒΨ  2021 B/S Olympics Champions! One of the coolest and most special parts of Psi is our remarkable, everlasting bond with the sisters of Tau Beta Sigma. Anything this incredible deserves a celebration, and luckily for us, the Directors of Brotherhood/Sisterhood Relations from Kappa Kappa Psi (Adriana Vree) and Tau Beta Sigma (Aylin Henstridge) planned a week-long “B/S week” where we had the opportunity to enjoy each others company, reflect on some of the values that bring us together, and of course, take part in some friendly competition. The week was action-packed with activities, games, and opportunities to make new friends as well as strengthen existing friendships, and a dash of studying -- because week 6 consists of working on assignments, starting new papers or getting ready for your 1st, 2nd, or 3rd midterm of the quarter! But with the support of your "brosters", absolutely anything is possible! To prepare for the upcoming week ahead, the brothers of Kappa Kappa Psi and sisters of Tau Beta Sigma had the opportunity to fill out a google form to participate in a Virtual PsiEk date night! A Brother and a Sister were paired together and given the opportunity to plan a virtual hangout any day throughout the week to catch up and play some fun activities. This was a great way to meet one-on-one with a friend or meet someone new and hangout! The first group event of the week was the B/S Olympics! All of the Brosters that attended the virtual event were split into groups of 3-4 and had the chance to meet up in a breakout room to create a team name and bond. Then, each group had to tackle challenges like relay races to see which group was the fastest to run around grabbing random household objects, and riff offs testing the quickness with which the groups are able to recall and sing the first song that comes to mind when given a word!  2021 B/S Amazing Race Champions, feat. Barack Obama! Because week 6 can be pretty class-intensive and demanding, the Directors of Brotherhood/Sisterhood Relations and their committees had our backs! Not only did they give us opportunities to de-stress and enjoy one of the best parts about school (our friends!), they also had a virtual study room open everyday of the week that there was not an event scheduled, for brosters to drop in and study together. It was a great opportunity to help each other cram for midterms or give a quick “good luck” and offer support! The concluding event of the week was the B/S Amazing Race. This virtual event allowed teams to travel all around the world (virtually), from France to Germany and pick up clues from the DOBSRs and their committee members in order to solve fun, yet thought provoking, riddles and move onto the next step. This was one of the most fun events of the week and each group definitely played to win. The final awards were incredibly suspenseful as some groups were only seconds to milliseconds away from winning, but ultimately only one group could take home the title of first place! Throughout the week, brothers and sisters were given prompts to talk about some of the most important aspects of the bond and why it’s so important. Especially in difficult times, the bond is something that keeps us going and B/S week was an incredible reminder of the friendship, support, appreciation and love that Kappa Kappa Psi and Tau Beta Sigma have for each other.
By Maddie Benson, ΒΩ This long-standing, widely-revered cultural touchpoint began in 1984 and still continues on today. You might sing the theme song in your head whenever you are given a brief wait time. What is...Jeopardy? This spring quarter, for one night only, a very special iteration of this iconic game show hit Zoom. What is...Alumni vs. Actives Trivia Night?
During this event, Psi alumni and actives alike assembled for some hearty, trivia-themed competition. Of course (as enhances any heated game night), the competitors assigned themselves spunky team names before heading into trivia battle (such as one group’s punny title “Over Armour”). Our host, an active named Kevin Reidy, provided contestants with a wealth of trivia questions. From UCLA facts, to scientific wisdom, to knowledge of pop culture, the intergenerational competition was fierce. Active member Jordan Casciato fondly remembers the cutthroat game show faceoff that took place, explaining: “Trivia night was super fun, even though I got absolutely slammed by the trivia.” Ultimately, one alumni emerged as the night’s clear trivia champion: Josh Epport. However, the real theme of the night was not about division or trivia-induced lifelong grudges. Even long after the game was over, competitors were still in the Zoom meeting--eager to get to know the dynamic, talented, and enthusiastic brothers who came together for a night of trivia fun. Volume XVI - Issue II - Winter 2021 Hello Alumni!
With more daylight and warm sunshine ahead, I want to wish you all a very happy spring! Our Chapter has had an exciting winter quarter, which I hope you'll read more about in the below articles. Speaking of "exciting" happenings: You may have followed our men's basketball team as they wrapped up a historic season with an insanely close game against Gonzaga in the Final Four. I can't miss the opportunity to give a shoutout to our Bruin athletes, who fought tooth and nail in a wide variety of sports this winter. Makes me proud to be a part of our UCLA community! Many of you know that we have also spent this quarter welcoming Beta Omega, the newest class of candidates. Huge thank you to all of you who have come to degrees, interviewed with candidates, or made an effort to meet the new members of your Psi family. Your involvement has not gone unnoticed. If you want to catch the final degree ceremony, join us in celebrating the end of this candidate season at Third Degree on Sun. April 11th at 5pm PST over Zoom. This quarter has also marked a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a year that has changed all of our lives for good. For current Bruins and recent graduates, it also marks a year since we began online learning. Despite the challenges and insurmountable tragedy we have collectively faced, Psi has continued to serve and connect with our communities in ways both big and small. Over the last 10 weeks, Brothers put on wonderful events like service through a recycling fundraiser, band banquet (during winter quarter!) to wrap up marching season, virtual State Days hosted by our Bruin Brothers and Sisters, and more! This edition of the Encore goes into detail about these events, highlighting the creativity and resilience of our Psi community during this time. Hopefully -- with vaccines on the rise, and COVID cases on the decline -- we can help each other foster and rediscover a sense of hope that we will return to (some) normalcy soon. Happy reading, everyone, and I hope you have a wonderful day! AEA, Carrie Appel, BX Alumni Relations Officer 2020-21 We are almost finished welcoming our newest class of candidates, who are completing all their requirements virtually! If you want to get more involved for the end of the candidate process, here are some ways you can:
Want to participate in our upcoming spring events?
Reach out to [email protected] at any time with questions, ideas, or concerns. And, be on the lookout for upcoming event announcements and other emails from me in the coming weeks. Happy spring to you all, and I hope you enjoy 2021's first edition of the Encore! By Kevin Reidy, ΒΧ  Image Description: Screenshot of a Zoom meeting, depicting ARO Carrie Appel with the five smiling Psi alumni panelists in individual squares Often in this pandemic, the best events remind us that internet isn’t the only important connection.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in late winter quarter, the Psi Chapter welcomed back a panel of alumni with experience working in the arts, media, and entertainment industries. Calling in from around the U.S., they included Josh Epport, Dr. Thomas Gamboa, Belinda Sumali, Amy Poliner, and Christina Martin, each of whom has built an impressive career and whose combined work has spanned all across the country in different sectors of the arts, from live performance to advertising to music licensing. With such a diversity of experiences from the panelists, PsiEK attendees to the event with different backgrounds and interests were welcomed with a wide range of ideas about how to enter different parts of the arts industry, how to learn, and how to succeed. Alumni Relations Officer Carrie Appel asked the panel questions on behalf of students who submitted questions. A question submission form before the event allowed actives a chance to bring up any points of interest or inquiries they wanted to be addressed by the panelists. In addition, breakout sessions later in the event encouraged students to connect with the alumni more directly, to talk about any of those inquiries or interests. Overall, the event was a heartwarming success. Many students stayed on for a few minutes after the scheduled end of the event just to thank the alumni for coming and sharing their thoughts, stories, and hard-earned wisdom. The smiles shared by the group signified lasting connections, made possible by the generosity and openness of the panelists, the willingness of the students to learn and meet new people, and—admittedly—the internet. Maybe the internet can ensure other important connections, after all. ~ To help stay connected to actives on a professional basis, join the Psi Chapter LinkedIn page here: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13502910/ By Adam Pingatore, ΒΧ Alternate Title: Thank you for coming to our TED talk  Image Description: Blue, yellow, and white flyer with "TedX Psi" in the upper right and "Passion and Purpose" in the lower left. Flyer includes headshots of the four TedX presenters. Close your eyes. Picture yourself in a dimly lit auditorium. There’s a stage in front of you, with a big screen displaying a slideshow, a big circular red carpet, somebody dressed rather smartly holding a microphone, and big red block letters spelling out “T - E - D”. But...wait...what’s that...after the “TED”...does that say what I think it says?...no...couldn’t be...wait...it is...IT SAYS “P-S-I”!!!! No way! Psi is holding a TED talk event?! Sweet!
On March 3, Brothers gathered not in a dimly lit auditorium, but on Zoom (come on, just use your imagination) for the first ever TEDxPsi event, organized by Brotherhood Relations Officer Ryan Lee! For those who haven’t seen a TED talk before (I strongly recommend you search for some online if you have not, they’re incredible), they are brief fifteen minute presentations from experts on a broad variety of topics, typically given at huge symposiums with thousands of people all around the world. Now, I wonder where I could find a group of around 50 really talented, passionate, intelligent individuals all in the same place that might be interested in organizing and attending one of these kinds of events….hmmm….oh yeah! That’s us! We had four incredible talks from Sydney Meyers, Ariel Fernandez, Erica Vellanoweth, and Adam Pingatore. Sydney gave an incredibly well researched and presented talk about ideas explored in the book The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, including how we can find happiness and meaning in various aspects of our daily lives, how adversity affects our brain, and how being aware of various aspects of our mental health can aid us in braving the extreme psychological challenge currently being imposed on us by the ongoing pandemic. Erica then came in with a crash course on Astrology, with information about its history, what it looks like today, and how brothers, using their celestial signs, can shoot for the stars. Adam shifted the tone toward environmentalism, with a presentation on the Ecology of California, talking about the incredible diversity of plants and animals that call California their home, the recent uptick in wildfires in our state, and how we can help conserve what we have left. Ariel closed out the event with an extremely interdisciplinary talk about the interconnectedness of gratitude, kindness, our well-being, and our brain chemistry, and how being mindful of these dynamics can help us improve as leaders and as people. A big thank you to Matthew Espinoza for creating graphics for the event, and to all the Sisters of Tau Beta Sigma - Epsilon Kappa and Brothers of Psi that were able to attend! The event was one of the most unique, successful, and inspiring that we’ve had in recent memory, and hopefully will come back and continue to grow as a staple of Psi’s event repertoire for years to come. By Emma Boone, ΒΦ Hello, Alumni! My name is Emma Boone and I am the Vice President of Membership this year for Psi. I have had my hands full recruiting and putting an entire class through our candidate process -- all virtually! And, I could not be enjoying it more. We have a candidate class full of 21 amazingly talented, hardworking, diverse, and passionate candidates that I know some of you have been able to meet through our degrees and interviews. We have nine California natives, two out-of-staters from Ohio and Massachusetts, and one candidate zooming from Canada! We meet once a week on Mondays for our weekly candidate lessons, every week with a fun theme. Sometimes we even meet before our lessons to hang out, bond, and play games! We have been doing all of our degrees virtually, and it has been an interesting experience to say the least. (Our last degree is on April 11th at 5pm PST, if you would like to join us!) Kappa Kappa Psi Nationals hosts the rituals, and then we or both Psi and TBS put on the degree ceremony for our candidates. My favorite part has been the Big/Little reveals, where Bigs and families go to their assigned room, change their backgrounds, and surprise the candidate once we put them in their room! Most interviews have been done via Zoom, although some candidates who live in the SoCal area have been able to safely meet with brothers and sisters in person on occasion. We have just two weeks left of the candidate process, and I cannot wait to welcome this outstanding class into active hood soon!  Group photo from First Degree! The Beta Omega sign is backwards 100% on purpose [Image Description: Screenshot of a Zoom meeting including Psi VPM and Beta Omega candidate class, all smiling and holding up hands to form "beta" and "omega" symbols in individual squares.] By Adam Pingatore, ΒΧ Alternate title: A CAN-do Attitude  Image Description: Adam Pingatore standing in a parking lot and giving a thumbs up, surrounded by 5 large cylindrical bins filled with recycled cans. Hey alumni, CAN you believe it’s already Spring?! We Brothers over here at the Psi Chapter sure CAN’t! Why, you may ask, the emphasis on “CAN”? Well, allow me to explain. Sometime in December as rainy days, statewide lockdowns, and 12 hour-long “naps” kept Brothers inside twiddling their thumbs and browsing the boundless World Wide Web, Adam Pingatore (hereafter referred to as “I”, since I’m writing this!) had a brief thought while drinking his third CAN of sparkling water for the day.
In California, whenever we purchase an aluminum CAN, plastic bottle, or glass bottle, we pay a 5-cent fee. This all started back in 1986, when the state passed the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act to incentivise, well, recycling containers and reducing litter! The system, which many of you are likely familiar with, works like this: 1) Pay a 5 cent deposit when purchasing a beverage of choice, 2) drink said beverage of choice, and 3) bring that empty container to one of 1,217 recycling centers across the state to get your money back! A simple task, it seems; however, when I realized that the closest recycling center to UCLA is around 5 miles from campus and that many brothers don’t have cars, an idea struck me. As a chapter, we could combine all of our CANs and bottles that were going to go into the normal (non-money-making) recycling, and redeem them all at the end of the quarter for a (hopefully) large sum. We would then vote, as a chapter, on a charity or organization in the LA area to which we could donate the proceeds. When I pitched this idea at weekly meeting, I fully expected it to be met with a lukewarm reception at best. What happened was quite the opposite! Throughout Winter quarter, 19 Brothers living in the Westwood area and 2 living outside the area pitched in and contributed to the ever-growing mountain of recyclables that accumulated on my porch (possibly to the dismay of my non-band-member roommates). The effort was phenomenal, and it was incredible to see brothers so get so excited and impassioned about such a simple concept on a weekly basis when I met with them to pick up and drop off CANs and bottles. In addition to the social and charitable aspects of the project, there’s also a large environmental benefit to redirecting all this recycling, since these recycling centers have, overall, better reputations for correctly processing recyclables than the conventional recycling pick up trucks that come to residences on a weekly basis Now the moment that everyone who managed to make it this far in the article has been waiting for: the NUMBERS! Overall, we raised $68.05 in a 10 week timeframe, which is not too shabby for our first time if I do say so myself! That money came from around 7.5 lbs of plastic, 7.5 lbs of glass, and 20 whole pounds of aluminum (for those of you really into the numbers, that works out to be around 660 cans). Chapter will have a poll in the coming weeks about where to donate all the funds. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be focusing on causes related to COVID, such as buying masks for communities that have less access to them, funding healthcare efforts, and the like. Lastly, a huge thank you to our Director of Service Gina Talcott, Treasurer Kylie Williams, and President Erica Vellanoweth for the tons of support this quarter for the project’s logistics. I hope all alumni reading this CAN see how awesome of an effort this was from all brothers involved, and I'm excited to continue this project for many quarters to come! By Natalie Wang, ΒΩ  Image Description: A horizontal line of 26 personalized, hand-drawn stick figures meant to represent the UCLA Drumline. There is only one time every year that a band kid looks half good — although the Downfall of Troy Show probably comes in a close second — and that time is none other than Band Banquet! Obviously, this year, Band Banquet was virtual, but that did not stop everyone from having fun. Our very cool Directors of Band Activities, Brianna Becerra (Psi) and Liz Gulli (EK), organized the event, boasting an exciting itinerary: Senior Slideshow, Senior Notes, Section Awards, Senior Roasts, and the Section Picture Contest.
The Senior Slideshow was fantastic as it showcased pictures of seniors from their childhood. It gave off the same feeling as watching a child fall and break all of their teeth. Simultaneously endearing and embarrassing. While the seniors had to suffer through pictures dug out from their past, they were offered some relief through Senior Notes. People could send kind messages to seniors through Google Forms. Wholesome! But we couldn’t make the seniors feel too comfortable, because after that, we had Senior Roasts. Sections were placed in their own breakout rooms and given free reign to (appropriately) tease their seniors. Hopefully, this tradition will be cut when I’m a senior because I do not need people leveraging 4 years of my regretful life actions against me. Then, we moved onto Section Awards. Because this season had been especially tough with coronavirus, a lot of section leaders took the time to recognize all of the hardworking first years in the band. It is not easy being part of the marching band in a virtual setting, but they made it work. Go baby bruins! We also had the Section Picture Contest. Each section photoshopped a funny photo of themselves, and we voted on which picture was the best. The drumline made my favorite, deciding to take a more risque approach, and they drew each member of their section as stick figures. It was fascinating how they were able to capture the essence of each member through simple lines, circles, and hairstyles. Definitely the best section photoshopped picture I had ever seen. However, if you were to ask me to identify each stick figure’s real identity, I would probably fail. All in all, Band Banquet was 10/10. I also got to wear pajama pants the whole time without anyone noticing, which is always a plus during these Zoom times. Of course, if anyone asks, I was formally dressed head to toe. By Erica Vellanoweth, ΒΦ This year, the Psi Chapter and Epsilon Kappa Chapter hosted the Western District’s annual State Days for the first time in over 5 years! The State Days Committee, chaired by the wonderful Ariel Fernandez (Psi) and Cecilia Porras (EK) worked tirelessly this quarter to put on an amazing event for KKPsi and TBS Chapters in California and Nevada. About 50 brothers and sisters from 7 different chapters were able to attend our Zoom celebration.  Image Description: A Zoom screenshot of those in attendance at State Days, with the words "2021 CaliVada State Days" at the top and "Separate But Together" at the bottom. The event started with a general welcome and introductions. All attendees were then placed into small groups to do an icebreaker and come up with a team name (based on the mood of the group and an office supply, ex. Pooped Post-Its) and a banner or anthem. We then shared all these with the group!
The groups then participated in a Self-Care/Resilience Discussion - a subject that we all needed to reflect on, especially after this past year. We talked about ways that we care for ourselves and take time to nurture ourselves, how we find comfort in our chapter, and how we’ve kept ourselves motivated during the toughest times. After, we shared with the whole group some tools, tips, and videos that have brightened our spirits when we needed it most! Following a short break, a Yoga session was conducted by the lovely Emma Boone (Psi), Shruti Indiresan (EK), and Justin Cole (EK)! The groups then finally met up one last time in breakout rooms to play games - their choice of Skribbl.io, Among Us, Codenames, Buzzfeed Quiz Party, or any other games they’ve liked to play in quarantine. The groups met up in the main room for one last time to say a final farewell, exchange contact information, and deliver congratulations to the people who helped organize! We hope to see many of those same brothers and sisters at next year’s State Days. |
Marissa Pe
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