The Senior Ballroom became a mecca of intellectual conversation and innovative ideas Friday at Washington State University’s Academic Showcase.

From 9 a.m. to noon, graduate students and faculty from WSU shared their revolutionary research that they had been preparing. Submissions for the showcase opened in January requiring that each project was original, scholarly and creative.

“It was really interesting how there were people from all around the world,” said Brittney Macintosh, a freshman studying communication.

Topics ranged through a wide span of majors including apparel design, chemistry, communication and agriculture. Visitors munched on the complementary pastries as they strolled down the aisles of posters, learning new things at each table.

“Some of the stuff that the graduate students and faculty work on are significant and have impact on our lives, and we should appreciate their life work,” said Mark Dinges, principal assistant to director of annual giving for the WSU Foundation.

One of the projects was called “Women as Eye Candy: Predictors of Sexual Objectification of Women,” which studied how music videos impact men’s response of sexually objectifying women.

“We wanted to investigate if music videos play a factor in the acceptance of women objectification,” said Nicole Cameron, graduate communication student. “Music videos are essentially long-term advertisements to sell the music and making the women in them highly sexual is how they target an audience.”

The Academic Showcase provided a stage for new ideas to be brought into the spotlight.

“The showcase is fabulous. It gives students and faculty the chance to show their research and learn about other projects going on in other departments,” Cameron said.

Undergraduate students will also have the opportunity to share their projects at today’s Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA). Similar to the earlier Academic Showcase, undergraduate students will display posters for their experiments and compete for various awards supported by companies such as Boeing. The undergraduate showcase has broken participation records this year with 186 students signed up to present.

Reporting by Minna Lee