Student Spotlight

By Evelyn Groeger

For this month our student spotlight goes to Isaac Fox, who is joining us as a freshman this year. Isaac though has taken a couple of years off between high school and college to pursue a long-time passion and goal, which was competing in the 2018 IEM PyeonChang Competition held in South Korea. In 2011, he began this journey when he started playing StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, which had gained great popularity in 2010 through streaming on the TV. From then on until 2018 he dedicated most of his time to advance in the game and came out as the North American qualifier. He describes the competitions as huge conventions where players have their seats either around a huge raised circle table that the top players sit at or multiple soundproof rooms each player is placed in. He not only has traveled to South Korea but also Germany and many other countries for these competitions. For those curious his gaming name is PANDABEARME, so if you are ever gaming and see that player you know you’ve just met Isaac. He now, however, is retired from that game and prefers single-player games because he’d rather be the reason for messing up on a game than someone else messing it up for him. Understandable since StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void is a single-player game and he’d been playing it for at least 8 years, so you’d get used to playing solo.

Isaac has begun his journey at USF with another passion and goal, which is to pursue media studies and ESPN sports. He thought someone should be documenting how much players progressed in these sports, so who better than himself. Already he has jumped into the media studies program and has taken up an important position with our football games as the game director. In this position, he oversees the cameras and decides which footage is shown during the game on the TV. This is right up his alley because he wants to do something with live broadcasting.

Now he is working on starting an Esports club and that will be coming to campus in the next month, so keep an eye out for that.

Isaac may seem busy with all these great activities, but he is always ready to meet new people and share his experiences with them.