Motivated to hit the books and flex their academic muscles, members of EC’s Alpha Phi chapter represented EC at the Alpha Gamma Sigma (AGS) State Convention on April 4 to 6.

“[The convention] was very exciting. There was an atmosphere of congeniality but also competition between the chapters,” Paul Rorie, business instructor and Alpha Gamma Sigma advisor, said.

The convention hosted numerous seminars, lectures and competitions for 35 California community college AGS chapters.

In the competitions, EC AGS won awards for Best Layout for Publications Chair Gustavo Perez’s design of the EC newsletter and Most Humorous cheer in the state, Omar El Adli, activities chair, said.

The EC chapter’s cheer was a spoof on Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA.”

“It was suprising. Some of these schools had totally elaborate cheers but for some crazy reason we won Most Humorous cheer,” El Adli said.

The group won these awards in spite of being handicapped by budget cuts from EC, he added.

“The competition was incredible steep. Other schools had 20 to 30 people to compete. We were limited by finance, but we did the best we could,” El Adli said.

EC was able to send seven students to the convention, Rorie said.

Notably, one of the seven, AGS President Faizan Mehmood, was awarded the Ed Walsh Service Scholarship.

“This scholarship has been awarded annually since 1970 to the AGS student who has given outstanding service to their college, chapter, and to their local community,” Mehmood said.

Beyond the awards, the convention gave the students the opportunity to become more motivated to reach their educational goals and showed them that anyone could succeed, attendees said.

“There was actually a homeless guy there that was 50 years old,” El Adli said. “He changed his life. He stopped doing drugs, and he’s at university now. He had found a niche in AGS and saw that other students were serious. He never thought he could do it.”

Other workshops showed students different tricks to succeed, Dhanu Prathap, vice president, said.

“The better study habits workshop was really good for me since I’m transferring this semester,” Prathap said, “We did an in-workshop experiment and we found that we weren’t able to remember as much when you listen to music with words.”

The convention also allowed the EC chapter to learn more about how to better serve the community.

“We had a chance to meet other chapter and exchange information and ideas to make better our chapter at El Camino,” Prathap said.

The ideas that the EC chapter plans to implement will help with serving the community.

“AGS does community service with actual interaction with people so we help the community directly,” El Adli said. “We try to cause a real change within the community.”