This week’s campus cutie is Malaea Ergina, a fourth year majoring in English Literature and minoring in Philosophy. Do not be fooled, however; this Montrealer may look like a character out of a cartoon strip, but she’s in fact a badass, yet nerdy HTML coder who got into it on a whim. “I was taught basic HTML at a fairly nerdy summer camp, Explorations (actually sponsored by McGill), when I was ten or eleven. I don’t remember why I signed up for it, actually. I probably just looked at it and thought, well, why not. After that I taught myself a bit more, stopped for awhile, and then re-learned everything when I started back up again through a combination of online tutorials and sheer bloody-mindedness,” she says. I don’t know about you, but I certainly wasn’t coding at eleven. There I was thinking I was a cool tween for self-identifying with “Daria” cartoons and renouncing “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
Malaea is in the midst of developing a personal blog and is the current online editor for Scrivener Creative Review, an internationally renowned literary magazine run by McGill students. She uploads monthly online issues, and conducts and edits video interviews with locally based artists. “I’m interested in digital publishing and new media,” she says. “It’s satisfying to make web pages [because] it’s work that produces a concrete result.” Malaea’s no-nonsense attitude and frank elocution is what gets everything done for this busy girl. And her sartorial style very much reflects her pragmatic character. Her style is composed, simple, and edgy with a dark feminine twist to it. “I guess right now I like Anna Chancellor’s “Lix Storm” from “The Hour”? I envy her cat-eye glasses. That’s not a good answer, is it? Oh well.” Uh, you’re awesome!? You can follow Malaea’s work with Scrivener at http://ausmcgill.com/scr/. If you don’t, you’ll make her angry, ARGH.