Faces at Georgia Tech: Wes Wilson

When Wes Wilson went out with friends the night before he graduated from Georgia Tech last August, he had no idea that at a nightclub, he would be approached with a life-changing opportunity: “I work for the WB...I do casting for Beauty and the Geek. Have you ever heard of it?”

After encouragement from his friends and family, the Computer Science graduate landed himself on the WB reality show Beauty and the Geek, known as a social experiment and produced by Ashton Kutcher.

Everyone on the current season of the show went to open casting calls, but only Tech alumni Wes Wilson was recruited.

“I guess I’m the only one who’s just that geeky. It wasn’t until later I figured it out...I was like, ‘You weren’t...looking for geeks in the club,’ and she [the recruiter] was like, ‘No, we were looking for beauties, but we got you.’”

The show’s premise puts eight gorgeous girls, known as the “beauties,” and eight brainy but socially awkward guys, known as the “geeks,” together, all living in the same house. They are paired off in teams, one beauty and one geek, and in each episode. They compete in various challenges to stay in the house. These challenges usually test the geeks on their social skills and pop culture and the beauties on their intellect and current events. One team is eliminated at the end of every challenge, and the last team standing shares the grand prize of $250,000.

Wilson’s geek stereotype on the show is “Tracks Monkeys with Lasers,” something he did while here at Tech at the Borg Lab in the College of Computing. Other geek stereotypes include “Speed Chess Champion,” “Rubik’s Cube Record Holder” and “Dungeon Master.” The beauties have stereotypes as well, including “Model,” “Hairstylist” and “Beer Spokesmodel” for Cher Tenbush, an SMU graduate now dating Wilson.

Many of the guys who hadn’t seen the first season downloaded the episodes and studied, but Wes said he went in without seeing any previous episodes and without knowing what to expect.

The month-long experience on the show turned out to be much more rewarding than he or any of the other cast members anticipated.

The stereotypes were the first border that everyone had to break.

Wilson appreciated the success of the show in expanding everyone’s horizons.

“You get past [the stereotypes] pretty quickly....You kind of start to pick up off each other. At first, the beauties were kind of separate and had their own sense of humor, and the geeks had ours. As it went, they started to overlap where the girls started quoting Carmen from South Park, so we knew we were making progress. We would talk about shopping. It’s kind of weird. And we’d start learning about celebrity gossip and celebrities’ kids and clothing lines. It got scary there, a little too successful! So yeah, we did fit into our stereotypes but there was common ground. Once you reach the common ground, it’s like creating a monster.”

Although Wilson went into the show with personal goals to become more confident and comfortable with himself, the producers of the show also had goals for each member of the cast.

“We had producers observing our actions twenty-four seven....They just bring to your attention your flaws. In real life, no one talks to you and no one says, ‘You know what, you kind of have self-defeating behavior. Look at what you did here; look at what you did here. Can you explain that?” Wilson said.

“They’re good at judging your character pretty quickly and seeing what you may need to improve on in life,” he said.

Wilson and Tenbush both agree that they were skeptical about the cheesy things they heard before going on the show, such as learning life lessons and making life-long friends.

“I heard, ‘You’ll remember your life before the show and your life after the show,’ and I remember laughing at them in my head, going, ‘Whatever!’ and now we’re living that,” Tenbush said.

Wilson and Tenbush became good friends with Ankur, known as “M.I.T. graduate” on the show, when the three of them began staying up late every night, talking, goofing off and calling themselves the “Late Night Crew.”

Much of the bonding on the show never makes it to air, however. What does make the final cut and is shown to audiences is actually only 1% of the total time they spent together during filming, a number that Tyson, “Rubik’s Cube Record Holder,” calculated for everyone.

What is shown on air is often one-sided and exaggerated, but both Wilson and Tenbush felt that the show’s producers did a good job on casting and editing.

“They’re going to have to cut out a whole lot of things. They might exaggerate things by only showing certain sides of people...but, you kind of have to do that. We’re taking both sides. [The producers] stayed true [to everyone], but they still had to do what they had to do to make ratings,” Wilson said.

What producers knew would help ratings was the unexpected romance that developed between Wilson and Tenbush during the filming of the show.

They weren’t partners, but their friendship and relationship grew during the time they spent staying up late talking every night. The show, however, inaccurately portrayed the two having a “wild night” in Vegas, but Tenbush and Wilson get a kick out of it.

Although some of the drama, competition and tension are artificially built up through clever editing, the changes all of the cast members went through are genuine. Tenbush accredits this to the producers who follow and question each of the cast members individually about certain actions and behaviors.

“You’re forced to analyze yourself. It’d be great if everyone had a week or a month, if they were forced to have a lot of time to think about what they would improve about themselves. You kind of have to [change],” Wilson said.

“Honestly, the competition was kind of weird. It got to the point where it wasn’t like you were trying to beat everybody else; you were just trying to do your personal best. And you really did better because of everybody else,” said Wilson.

“I think I was pretty geeky before the show. I have my geek credentials; I did play with the Lego robots in high school,” Wilson said.

“I don’t think being a geek means you have to be antisocial… I think there’s a lot of negative stereotypes that go along with it, and hopefully this’ll help push some of the positive ones and show that we to have to fit all the negative ones. Geek is cool!”

Wilson also offers hope to the “geeks” at Georgia Tech who may need a little help.

“Clubs and bars are not the place to meet girls. Take your interests, find an [organization], get involved, go to Tech events. Tech does a good job of providing outlets to be social and to meet people. It’s just a matter of taking advantage of that.... I would meet people from other schools. Stay open-minded.”

The season is currently halfway through its run, with only three teams remaining. The show airs on the WB on Thursday nights at 9 p.m.