Sister To Sister hosted its second annual talent show, Rock’s Got Talent, on Tuesday March 1 in the Smith Student Center Ballroom, which showcased all of the talents of different SRU students.
Junior public relations major and President of Sister To Sister, Shannon Pitcairn said she came up with the idea of a stress reliever around finals time.
Pitcairn explained that there is a team who helps her plan the event about a month in advance to tie the loose ends together. She stated that it is a working effort with the Executive Board of Sister To Sister and ARHS.
“ARHS was a really large sponsor and helped me a lot with getting the event together,” Pitcairn said. “It took at least a month to plan because the executive board and I had to meet with ARHS and present our new ideas to them.”
When asked how she finds acts to perform in the show, Pitcairn said that she seeks out friends and people on Snapchat.
“Two weeks ago I sent out a Snapchat to everyone in my contact list asking if they had a talent or knew of someone who did and fortunately, I had two people reply back,” Pitcairn said.
Freshman exercise science major and Rock’s Got Talent runner-up, Dayne Fields said he didn’t really come up with an act, just to freestyle dance.
“I found a song that I liked and listened to it over and over again until I got used to where certain parts were,” Fields said.“I love to dance for people and it is very important to me, so that’s why I signed up.”
The show featured a variety of different routines that consisted of singing, dancing, rapping, and poetry.
Sophomore marketing major Sierra Ginther said when coming to view the talent show, she was open to watching anything.
“I liked how there were a lot of different acts and how it all wasn’t just singing or dancing,” Ginther said.
According to Pitcairn, the order of the acts are somewhat random, but it is made sure that there are never any back-to-back acts of the same talent next to each other.
Freshman undeclared major and Rock’s Got Talent winner, Michaela Dalessio said she picked the song she was going to sing for the show ten minutes before going on stage.
“I’ve known the song ‘Best Thing I Never Had’ by Beyoncé for a while, so I just went with it,” Dalessio said.
Pitcairn said that the organization went off of what went well in the first show and made improvements from there.
“We don’t use judges for the event anymore,” Pitcairn said. “We had a judging panel back in 2014 which was a parody of America’s Got Talent, but this year to make it simpler we set up a voting process at the end of the show.”
The audience members now decide who wins by texting a number at the end of the show which gets sent into a polling service. Each audience member submits the letter corresponding to the student that they want to win. The votes are then gathered and a percentage is given to see who the audience voted for the most.
At the end of the event, Pitcairn decided that the amount of applause from the audience would determine the winner, and that is when Dalessio was announced the frontrunner.
“I sing all the time, so it was just fun and something for me to do,” Dalessio, said.
Prizes were given out to the overall winner of Rock’s Got Talent and the runner-up. There were also two gifts given out to random audience members who promoted the Sister To Sister social media account during the show.
“In 2014 we had close to 100 students attend the event and we had to bring in more chairs because so many students were standing,” Pitcairn said.
This year’s show had close to the same amount of attendees and made the second Rock’s Got Talent event successful.
“You could really see the personality of the performers through their acts,” said Ginther. “I think that’s what made the show so fun to watch.”
