Student Spotlight: Rob duquette, trumpet

Before the band files out onto Elbel for rehearsal, a few early-comers have caught glimpses of bright-colored clubs flying through the air. When they follow the neon arcs to their source, they find Robert Duquette, who has been juggling ever since his freshman year of high school. 

"A good friend of mine from high school knew how to juggle," Duquette said. "We were at a football game where we weren't performing and he taught me. We would juggle in our band hall in our free time and I stuck with it."

This year also marks another four-year tradition for Duquette: Trick-a-Day May. 

"Recently, I did Trick-a-Day May, where I posted a trick for every day of May," Duquette said. "One thing I really like about it is that it really pushes me to be creative with coming up with new tricks. A lot of times I'll pursue difficult tricks that I haven't practiced enough, but I'll put a good spin on it. It's a good exercise in creativity. In my basement I found an old frying pan and some lacrosse balls and I came up with a new trick where I would bounce the balls off of the pan. Another trick I am very proud of is called ‘eight-ball duplexes.’ Essentially, you're juggling four pairs of balls, so you're throwing and catching two balls at the same time. I've been working on that for quite a while and I was recently able to get it." 

Duquette first started Trick-a-Day May after he saw other jugglers posting their tricks for the challenge on social media. This was the first year he posted the challenge on an instagram account he made to showcase his juggling.  

"I really like being able to share my tricks and share my art with the world," Duquette said. "Seeing other people's art forms has always been very inspirational to me, so I wanted to give back. It's pretty cool to go back and watch old videos. It's inspiring to see how much I have grown as a juggler. I'll go back and see that there are some tricks that were very hard for me to learn at the time. I recently watched one where I was learning to juggle five balls. Now I am much more capable and I love seeing my growth over time. Sometimes I'll forget I know a trick and I'll go back and see the video and try the trick again and it's a lot of fun. It always makes me so happy when people say they enjoy watching it."

Duquette draws a lot of inspiration from tricks posted online. 

"Sometimes I'll see someone on instagram do a trick and I try to learn it," Duquette said. "If it's something similar to something I've done I'll break it into different parts and learn it bit by bit. Sometimes I just try random things and sometimes it works and I have a new trick. I end up just trying a lot of random things just for fun, a lot of things that are out of my skill level, but I'll find something that works for some reason or another and I push my limits of juggling."

At Michigan, Duquette studies aerospace engineering. He hopes to take advantage of the developing robotics programs in the College of Engineering as well. 

"There are so many cool applications for aerospace and robotics," Duquette said. "For space missions especially, you get one shot. Even from an outside perspective it's so cool to watch these people who have worked on a project their whole life and see it succeed. I hope to have that experience some day."

The first show Duquette marched was the "Summer of '69" show his freshman year. The atmosphere of performing in the Big House and the bonding opportunities with fellow band members are some of Duquette's favorite memories during his time in the MMB.  

"There was one rehearsal where it was snowy out and we didn't have instruments so we were singing our parts and one of the trumpets decided to sculpt a trumpet out of snow," Duquette said. "We kept making more snow trumpets and passed them around until almost everyone had a trumpet made of snow. There was one rehearsal where snow dusted the field and Alex Peck (trumpet) made a bunch of Amungus figures. Another favorite memory was a rehearsal where it was pouring really hard and we were just being goofy in the rain."

This season will be Duquette's fourth year marching trumpet with the MMB.