The five students who recently founded the Spartan DJ Club share plenty in common.
Four major in fields related to the business world, all of them are freshmen and none of them have any previous DJing experience.
“We think this club has the potential to be the largest club on campus,” supply chain management freshman and club president Chris Chacko said. “Everyone has an interest in music so why not?”
If Chacko sounds confident despite his club’s dearth of DJing experience, it’s because he and the other founders discovered qualified mentors in MSU Office of Cultural and Academic Transitions coordinator and longtime DJ, Juan Flores, in addition to Flores’ friend, Lansing area music educator David Torres.
Chacko said he first saw Flores speak at a summer business education program he attended with two of the club’s co-founders. Chacko later saw Flores DJing at this past year’s Sparticipation event and asked Flores if he would be interested in helping teach the club’s founders the art.
“Our whole goal with this is to have people try it out,” the club’s public relations officer and marketing freshman Dave Martin said.
Members of the club hope to acquire a diverse musical equipment set so beginners can enjoy a range of musical experiences and learn how to use them if needed.
“Our plans are to invest in a lot of various kinds of equipment, like beat pads, keyboards, DJ controllers,” Martin said.
Starting a new club from the ground up is giving the club’s founders plenty of experience relevant to future career aspirations and studies.
“We are really taking this seriously and treating it like a company,” Chacko said. “We are marketing, handling financial issues, talking with artists.”
For Diego Neira, the club’s promotions officer and a theatre freshman, DJing broadens his horizons as an artist and entertainer.
“I’ve studied a lot of theater and musical theater but never actually studied music,” Neira said. “Music and acting are really closely intertwined and this is a really good look at entertainment outside of the world of just straight up acting.”
The club hopes to see its efforts this year culminate in an end of the year concert put on with other campus groups to benefit Detroit Public Schools.
“We are tapping into every resource we can to make this concert reach it’s full potential,” Chacko said.
