Andreas Jeninga/The Hoya Billy Wuyek (MSB `04) is master of the grill at Georgetown, having started up one of the university’s most popular clubs, the Grilling Society, or GUGS.

Billy Wuyek (MSB ’04) was nervous. It was the end of the 2002 fall semester, and he was sitting with his friends in front of the Student Activities Commission, trying to persuade it to approve a club idea they had thought up that summer.

The same commission that funds clubs like the Georgetown Society for Governance and the French Cultural Association was slightly skeptical of the new proposal – the Georgetown University Grilling Society.

“Where will you keep the grills?” they asked. “Where will you store the food?” All questions that Wuyek confesses he and his buddies did not, per se, actually have the answers to at the time.

About some things, however, he was certain. When a SAC commissioner asked him if his proposed club’s acronym, GUGS, was pronounced with “a soft G or a hard G?” Wuyek responded that it sounded like “jugs.”

“Let’s face it,” he says now. “A club that’s called `jugs’ is probably a lot more fun than a club that’s called `ghugs.'”

Now involving roughly 35 regular participants and hauling in up to $1,600 in revenue for some events, the club that Wuyek was uncertain would ever even exist has now become something of a Georgetown phenomenon. During special events, GAAP weekends or just on sunny days, students drawn by the blaring radio and wafting scent of meat fill the edge of Red Square near Copley Lawn to wait for half-pound burgers, hot dogs or chicken breasts.

“We want to make it part of the campus culture,” says GUGS President Wuyek, proudly wearing the black collared shirt that designates him as a “Grillmaster,” or one of 13 club members specially trained to grill the food. “We want to bring a greater sense of community . to make it a better way to enjoy your day at Georgetown.”

He says students will tell him they could not wait to get out of class in the White-Gravenor building because they could smell the food cooking outside. Professors will jokingly ask him if he can cook faster so students stop walking in late with hamburgers in their hands. Some quick-thinking students will even bring extra food to appease the teacher in those cases.

This year, GUGS was named the Center for Student Programs Outstanding Student Organization, and Wuyek was nominated for the Center for Student Programs Outstanding Senior award.

And no one could be more surprised at his success than Wuyek himself. Just two years ago, the tall, amiable Virginia native found himself in something of a rut. He no longer enjoyed playing for the football team, and his grades were so low that he worried he might fail out of school. He then made the difficult decision to quit the football team, the one activity that had largely defined his first two years at college. His father, who took pride in Wuyek’s guard and tackle position on an elite university’s squad, was “really upset,” Wuyek says.

That summer, Wuyek and his friends began grilling in earnest. It was a skill Wuyek had learned from his father, growing up in areas of Maryland and Virginia with “huge backyards,” as a simple and inexpensive way to feed a family of six.

But Wuyek soon discovered that grilling food had other uses. One day that summer, he and his friends decided to throw a barbecue party on the Village A rooftops, charging $5 for admittance. The event started at noon, but people enjoyed themselves so much that it ended up lasting until 2 a.m. Before that, Wuyek and his buddies had been joking around about “how cool it would be to get the school to pay for us to grill,” he says. But the party helped cement the decision. “At that point, we were like, `Let’s do it.'”

Wuyek came up with the concept along with two friends, Brian Smith (COL ’04) and John Keegan (MSB ’04), whom he says have since left GUGS for other activities. They had difficulty initially convincing people – not to mention SAC commissions – that they were legit, that “it was for the students, it wasn’t just us [grilling] in our backyard,” as Wuyek puts it.

They started out with one grill and a tight budget. “It was like, `OK, Billy’s got $100 in his checking account – let’s go to Costco and hope we get enough money back [from selling food].'” They grilled for campus events like “Meating and Movies,” where students snacked on hamburgers and hot dogs while watching films in the Village A Community Room. Demand was enormous for the leftover food. Soon they were catering more campus events, grilling outside once or twice a week and developing a devout following on campus – and off.

A high school senior once contacted Wuyek and told him he couldn’t wait to join GUGS – in fact, the club was one of the “top three reasons he was coming to Georgetown.” And on a college discussion forum at the college preparation Web site, collegeconfidential.com, the topic “Georgetown University Grilling Society” elicits such posts as: “ha, i mentioned it in the `relate your future goals to georgetown’ essay. i want to be a mastah grillah,” and “I’m so there.”

The positive feedback from the community is a point of personal pride for Wuyek. He developed the preparation process for the meat (the secret to the hamburgers, for instance, is a good dose of season salt and Worcester sauce), personally trained the new grillers and devoted enormous amounts of his time and energy to the organization.

The preparation time for a barbecue takes about 10 hours, not to mention the five actually spent at the grill, which Wuyek – who also works as a bartender – likens to “bartending on a busy night.” But there are also the administrative and financial aspects of running the club, which most people never see.

“It’s a lot of business school stuff,” Wuyek says. “It’s really, really cool to look back on the first two years of business school and really apply it.”

Wuyek, an operations and information management and marketing major, also has a minor in music. When he is not organizing GUGS events, bartending or doing schoolwork, one can find him in a recording studio with his guitar, bass or drums. He creates all kinds of music, he says, from electronic to rock, and has even recorded an album. “Being a rock star has always been a dream of mine,” he admits with a grin.

Like many seniors, he doesn’t know where he will be in 10 years, or even next year. But – at least if the rock star dream doesn’t play out – he does know that he would “like to be at the top somewhere – making decisions, getting people excited.”

It’s a job description that largely fits Wuyek’s experience as GUGS president: inspiring prospective students, building an organization from the ground up and helping ensure its sustainability, getting overworked students and faculty to mingle and talk around a large grill, bun and plate in hand.

Yet for Wuyek, the most rewarding experience might have been one moment this past April, when his father and two siblings came up for GAAP weekend. His father knew that Wuyek had started a grilling society, but, “He didn’t really get it until he saw 50 people in line and 20 people behind the grill.”

His father, still carrying the disappointment of Wuyek’s departure from the football team, started to choke up. Wuyek’s mother had stayed home, and his father, surveying the scene, told him simply, “Your mom would be so proud if she were here.” Wuyek knew at that moment, however, that both his parents were proud of him.

The rest of the day, his father and his siblings worked beside him at the grill, flipping burgers and turning hot dogs, much like they used to do when Wuyek was growing up.

“In the end, it really brought us all together,” Wuyek says about GUGS. “At that point, I was like, `This is it. This is my greatest achievement I’ve had yet.'”