Chapter 176 - 177: Campus Culture Festival Public Casting
The two continued chatting for a while.
Wen Xiaochu suddenly said, “By the way, I saw earlier that you’re very popular in the university culture festival voting, and it looks like you’re heading towards winning. Seems like Mr. Gu has brought you quite a lot of popularity.” Xia Yangyang was taken aback, “What culture festival?”
Wen Xiaochu replied, “The annual campus culture festival, where every university puts forth a program to compete. The winning program receives awards from the Ministry of Culture. This is a matter that concerns the school’s reputation, and this year’s culture festival coincides with A University’s 100th anniversary. A University has won the hosting rights this time, so the school is taking it very seriously.”
Xia Yangyang was actually aware of the annual campus culture festival.
It was like a “Cultural Exchange Olympics” between various universities.
Every year, in order to secure hosting rights, universities would engage in intense, if not covert, competition.
The culture festival took place annually at the end of October. The top 32 universities nationwide would each put forth a program to compete. Ministers of Culture, senior officials in the Ministry of Education, and even a specially appointed education minister would attend. The education minister had even set up high-value cash prizes and awards in recent years.
While it was billed as promoting cultural exchange, it was essentially a competition of strength between universities.
And the schools always took it seriously.
Xia Yangyang asked puzzledly, “But isn’t the program for competition always handled by the performing arts department?”
The reason Xia Yangyang had never paid attention to it was because it had been a norm over the years that the opportunity to compete was essentially handed over to the School of Performing Arts.
That place was filled with talent and stunning individuals, some of whom had already stepped into the entertainment industry and were somewhat famous.
Naturally, competitions that brought glory to the school in cultural and entertainment activities should be led by them.
Moreover, it was said that the annual campus culture festival was a great opportunity for acting majors to outperform each other because scouts from the entertainment industry would be present on the day of the competition.
If they were picked, they might be shot to stardom instantly.
The current “Dolphin Voice Little Princess” Wang Zixuan in the entertainment industry was indeed the winner of the last University Culture Festival. After her stunning performance of Vitas’s “Opera 2″, she was spotted by a talent scout which led to the release of her first album and her role in two idol dramas in the same year, making her famous overnight.
The students in the performing arts department practically viewed the culture festival as the best springboard to the entertainment industry, and every year, some controversy would arise over the program.
Wen Xiaochu explained,”This typically didn’t involve us in the past, but this year the school came up with a new rule: the competition program the school has in mind is a drama performance, so they have opened voting to the entire school to select the most popular male and female student to be the lead actors in the drama. The announcement was sent out a month ago. The voting post was also published on the official website, with pretty much every student’s name on it. The deadline is tomorrow, and when I checked this morning, you were the most popular among the female students, followed closely by Kim Fei’er.”
Xia Yangyang had been soaking in the drama group a month ago, so she hadn’t had time to pay attention to this.
Now that she finally found the time to check her phone, she visited the campus forum, which she would otherwise ignore for years.
As expected, she was indeed the undisputed winner in the popularity vote, with over thirty thousand votes, considerably ahead of the second-place contestant who had just over ten thousand votes.
She also glanced at the voting results for the male students.
Unsurprisingly, the male student with the most votes was the heartthrob of A University, Gu Zhaohan..