“This is a way that everybody gets to be a rock star for a day,” said Assistant Professor of Art Mark Dixon.

The Guilford Undergraduate Symposium is an annual event for members of the Guilford community to share their work with others and discuss a variety of topics. In preparation for GUS, a Pre-GUS Celebration was held in front of Hege Library on March 11 from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. The celebration gave students the opportunity to learn more about GUS while enjoying music or throwing a frisbee.

“GUS is important for the community to be able to get together,” said Professor of Biology Melanie Lee-Brown. “It’s for community understanding.”

GUS gives students the opportunity to share their academic projects and interests with members of the Guilford community.

“When student A understands what student B is doing, that seeds collaboration,” said Dixon. “That seeds a deeper understanding about what passion and education and research looks like. It’s modeling and it’s a conversation between students.”

GUS is an opportunity for students to present academic works that may have been difficult to share with the Guilford community in other forms.

“Without GUS, the only people who get to turn their work, which they’ve been putting all of their time and passion into, out into the community is the artists and the musicians and the theater students,” said Dixon.

GUS gives students who may not otherwise have the chance to showcase their work to do so.

“It’s for us to be able to see what scholarship is across the college and also for us to see where there’s opportunities for us to come together over different process and classes,” said Lee-Brown. “To be able to give students the best education possible and to prepare them for the future.”

GUS is not only an opportunity to share their work, but it also serves to encourage students to explore academic topics that interest them.

“My experience in classes is that when we work for ourselves, we are in this closable cell, but as soon as I start talking about the exposure and the community interaction that this brings, it just raises the level of conversation and it tends to lead to deeper, better and more work being done,” said Dixon. “I think people understand audience and when you’re out there in the public, it’s really different from when you’re in the classroom.”

In order to keep all students involved in the event, GUS has a variety of activities for students between presentations.

“There is something for everybody,” said Lee-Brown. “Come and enjoy the day. Discover.”