By Dave Stephens
Staff Writer

Trey Geiger remembers sitting in his dorm room as a freshman playing video games; never did he think that it might some day be his job.

Geiger, a junior in the School of Management, and Tyrelle Collins, a senior in the School of Liberal Arts, are the campus reps for the EA SPORTS College Xperience. The College Xperience is a grass roots marketing campaign that showcases the latest EA SPORTS entertainment titles for the Sony PlayStation.

As many video game enthusiasts may know, EA SPORTS is a popular maker of games such as Madden NFL Football, Triple Play Baseball, and Tiger Woods PGA Golf Tour.

The College Xperience program was started to help market video games to people aged 18 to 24 who are the leading demographic of video game purchasers.

The amount of work required for Geiger depends greatly on the individual week, but they like to host two events every week at local restaurants, residence halls, fraternities and other locations around campus.

"We pretty much have a clean slate, we'll do what people want us to do, our main goal is to get people to recognize the EA SPORTS name," he said. Geiger said that the best thing about his job was that he got all of the latest games free and he got to learn about the new things in development.

"The challenge of the job is with Purdue's population well over 35,000, it's hard to get the word spread out to all the different groups on campus," Geiger said.

One way they hope to overcome this is by hosting big campus-wide tournaments, like the March Madness basketball tournament to be held in the Memorial Union on March 28. They also plan to start a barn—storming tour of the residence halls, and they plan to entice people to their outings with give—a—ways and prizes such as t—shirts, cups, key chains, posters and the games themselves.

"We are still looking for places to hold events," Geiger said. "Our events are entirely free, all we need is an electrical outlet and a television. The advantage of hosting an event is to attract a large number of people to your establishment."

Geiger hopes one day to use what he has learned with the College Xperience to help him go into a career in sales.

"It's been like an internship," Geiger said, who emphasizes that while he is having fun, he is learning a lot, too. Geiger also said that what has been the most rewarding part of his job is giving students "something new to do at Purdue, besides sitting around bored."