Reading the Room
Under the flickering lights of Abbott Dining Hall, a swarm of students jumped and sang as songs blasted in the space like an artificial thunderstorm. Sneakers thudded down against the terrazzo tile; laughter rolled like bass. The air shimmered with sweat and color and noise, all of it tied together by one steady pulse.
Behind the booth, framed by LED panels and a tower of speakers, Alexander Salgado-Lozhkin ’26 grinned as the next beat dropped, his hands sweeping across the mixer in the same instinctive motion his father once used on the decks of Puerto Rico’s most legendary nightclubs. For Salgado-Lozhkin, the art of spinning and mixing is not merely a pastime, but something closer to an inheritance.
“My dad has been a DJ since 1991,” he said with both pride and amusement. “All the equipment you saw at Homecoming was, in fact, his.”
Salgado-Lozhkin’s father, Luis Salgado-Clara P’26, once directed one of the biggest clubs in Puerto Rico; his uncle ran the other. Together, they ruled the island’s nightlife. According to Salgado-Lozhkin, his father and uncle “met figures like Donald Trump, Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, and basically all celebrities from the ’90s and early 2000s.” Salgado-Lozhkin grew up surrounded by soundboards, rhythm, and reels of wire that hummed with electricity.
“I kind of just picked it up from him,” he said.
That legacy came to life when Salgado-Lozhkin first arrived at Lawrenceville as a Second Former and he began working most of the dances on campus. His sets are now woven into weekends: bits of pop anthems and TikTok beats colliding with familiar throwbacks. Each transition feels impulsive in the best way, like a conversation that bursts into laughter. Salgado-Lozhkin’s process lives somewhere between planning and instinct. He watched the Homecoming crowd as carefully as an athlete watches game tapes, tracking every rise and drop in energy until he knew exactly when to strike. His secret weapon is balance — knowing when to feed the crowd what it wants and when to throw it a curveball.
“When you are deejaying, you really cannot be selfish,” he said.
His sets flow through three tempos: reggaetón, hip-hop, and drill or dance beats. Every so often, Salgado-Lozhkin plays with a bit of chaos, sending the crowd from confusion to laughter in a single beat. At Homecoming, for instance, Salgado-Lozhkin dropped DJ Snake and Lil John’s “Turn Down for What?” and then went straight into the ABBA classic “Dancing Queen” right at the climax.
“People get mad for half a second, but they still dance,” he said. “That’s the point — you want them to laugh and move at the same time.”
Beneath the humor, however, runs the quiet tension of a job that looks carefree but instead carries the weight of every beat.
“It is like public speaking for an hour and a half straight,” Salgado-Lozhkin said. “You are the one controlling the vibe, and if it slips, everyone feels it.”
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Tin Ho Xiong ’27 writes for The Lawrence. A version of this story originally appeared as “DJ Got Us Falling In Love: Profile of Alexander Salgado-Lozhkin ’26.”