Communication department grad students attempted to foster comradeship between graduate students and faculty at the second-annual Pumpkin Carving Contest.The contest’s organizer, graduate student Daren Brabham, decided the contest would be a novel way to bolster a sense of community.
“I saw some pumpkins at a grocery store last year, and I thought it would be fun,” he said.
There are two awards for the contest: The Utah Difference Award for Best Pumpkin and The Professor Irving Feldman Award.
The pumpkin that best resembles a faculty member receives the Professor Irving Feldman Award, Brabham said.
The Feldman award is a joke that began when the communication office was on Presidents’ Circle. The building’s attic had a crawl space for storage and was referred to as the office of the imaginary faculty member.
“Anything that went wrong in the office was blamed on Irving Feldman,” he said.
The joke is now honored as the Feldman award, which encourages humorous re-creations of faculty members by students who are tired and bitter about long hours spent studying.
“I had to enter,” said graduate student Roger Altizer. “This was a chance to rib a professor and not get in trouble.”
His pumpkin’s representation was of professor David Vergobbi.
“I think that pumpkin carving is a lost art form, and as a communication community, we need to learn to express ourselves through gourds and other fruits,” Altizer said. Graduate students, faculty and staff all voted throughout the week until Friday, when the final ballots were collected. Prizes will most likely be gift certificates to Avenues Bakery, on South Temple.