300 pairs of eyes fix on her, relying on her leadership and white gloves to guide them through the next 12 minutes of their lives.
DeAnna Uranga, 22, is the drum major of the Arizona State University Sun Devil Marching Band during half time performances at Sun Devil Stadium.
It’s those eyes that motivate her to achieve a double major in music and clinical lab science as well.
“My high school band director always used to say ‘The eye is always on you’,” Uranga said. “The way I choose to live my life is that someone is always looking up to me somewhere.”
This motto helps her to stay focused on a demanding track.
“Its just something about what I like,” Uranga said. “I like having responsibility, and having 18 credit hours a semester isn’t bad.”
But in the midst of those classes, she somehow finds time during the fall to lead over 300 students as the drum major for the ASU Marching Band.
“I like having a lot to do,” Uranga said.
During the football season, Uranga spends over 20 hours a week preparing, leading, and organizing the band to perform during ASU football games.
So how does Uranga find time to be successful in two very different and demanding degrees while finding time to lead several hundred students on a weekly basis?
She finds a good balance between her two loves, music and science.
“It’s a happy balance, Uranga said. “The second I start getting tired of seeing a saxophone or a French horn, I go look at a science book.”
Uranga grew up finding pleasure in her two areas of study from an early age.
She started playing the French horn in sixth grade, then at Canyon del Oro high school in Tucson, she found that she was good at science.
There, Uranga started performing in the marching band during her freshman year, and by her junior year, she was the drum major of her high school’s marching band.
“It was like being a parent,” Uranga said.
However, it wasn’t just her skill as a leader on the field that got her to go to ASU.
Uranga pursued a music performance degree after she got an opportunity to perform with the Arizona All-State Band her senior year of high school.
John Ericson, of ASU’s French horn studio, offered Uranga a tuition waiver scholarship to perform in the program.
“I started out as a performance major,” Uranga said. “I was practicing at least three hours a day and taking 17 credit hours.”
Uranga first took on the challenge of being in the school of music and showed the marching band that she had real potential to be a leader, even performing a solo her freshman year at ASU.
She moved up to a rank leader her sophomore year in the marching band.
“I wanted to be section leader,” Uranga said. “But there was the whole seniority thing.”
She wanted to make a difference and not just be another set of eyes on the field.
During Uranga’s sophomore year, she decided that the school of music and the marching band just wasn’t enough. She wanted to take on the clinical lab science degree as well.
“I was going through the routines and I realized that I didn’t want to do just music.” Uranga said.
Uranga believes the class load isn’t the problem; it’s more of getting the classes to fit together. In the past, she has had to take classes that overlap.
Despite the endless hours of practicing music and studying science books, Uranga finds she learns life lessons on the marching field.
“I would not have grown as much when it comes to personality or maturity,” Uranga said.
On the marching field is where Uranga feels she can truly achieve her goal as a performer.
“I want to be someone’s hero,” said Uranga, always conscious of those eyes looking for a leader.
“People will see what you do and how you play on the field. They will be inspired to work harder at what they’re doing and inspired to be better.”
