JASON CHRISTMAN / Scroll
Kristen Rushdi, a senior from Pocatello, Idaho plays the drums in the Eliza R. Snow Building while she practices.

Girls can be the minority, even at BYU-Idaho

by John Walker WAL01008@BYUI.EDU A&E Asst. Editor

Being an amateur musician, a construction management major and an accomplished drummer is hard enough without being female.

But Kristen Rushdi, a senior from Pocatello, Idaho, shows that participating in male-dominated activities is a piece of cake, so long as you don’t mind a little adversity.

Rushdi has been playing the drums since she was very young. In junior high she was captain of the drum line and stood alone as the only female drummer.

When she arrived in high school, the scenery didn’t change much. She was one of two female drummers in a male- dominated drum line.

But Rushdi didn’t let that bother her.

“Being a female drummer caused problems when I competed in competitions. I would sit down at the drum set and the judges would make a pre-conception about me, ‘Oh she’s a girl. What’s she doing here?’” Rushdi said.

“That posed problems for me all the way through high school, and to some extent it still does today,” she said.

However it is something that Rushdi has learned to deal with.

“As far as overcoming it, I have made goals to work even harder, to surpass those peoples’ expectations,” Rushdi said. “In high school I would practice for hours and hours and stay up all night before auditions. I would make it absolutely perfect, so that they had no doubt in their mind that ‘Wow, she could do it.’”

Since high school she has kept up her musical skills by practicing and teaching private lessons. In December of 2004, she released a Christmas album of vocals and piano music that was sold in the BYU-Idaho Bookstore and in Pocatello. But that is not the only field that Rushdi successfully participates in.

Rushdi’s major is construction management, a major which only two females are pursuing — Rushdi and one other. She is also in the Architecture and Construction Management Association presidency.

“In my major, I want to be out on the construction field, but as soon as I tell anyone that they’re like, ‘You’re a girl.’”

When Rushdi was in Japan as a foreign-exchange student, she fell in love with architecture. After winning many music scholarships in other universities, she finally settled for coming to BYU-I and graduated with an associates degree in architecture and went to work for a company in California called Pulte Homes.

After working for Pulte Homes she decided to come back to BYU-I and earn her degree in construction management.

“It’s something that I have just learned to deal with. People will make their opinions before they know anything about me, and that’s OK, because I am not here to please everybody. But it has definitely been a struggle.”

Even more of a struggle for Rushdi has been the unexpected death of her sister last October. To help her overcome that crisis, she wrote music.

“About the time my sister died I began composing a lot of songs. It was kind of my release,” Rushdi said.

Someone also familiar with the stigma and prejudice associated with female drummers is Kari Bybee, a sophomore from Rexburg. She played percussion instruments in high school and is experienced with the prejudices associated with female drummers.

“Others think that we can’t play as well because the drums are heavy, but we show them every time that we can,” Bybee said.

To show the other band members that they could do it, Bybee and the other few female drummers would do push-ups while carrying big bass drums on their backs.

“I know that there was a lot of discrimination with our percussion instructor. He favored the guys more than us, so we just worked harder,” Bybee said.

Rushdi said that when people told her that she could not do something, it only pushed her even harder to do her best.

“People thinking that I couldn’t do it would make me want to do it even more,” Rushdi said.