ASC Winter Formal 2008 Presents...ELEGANCE

It has FINALLY been decided!
ASC is co-hosting with HCO, MAC & SA Diversity Initiatives this year to bring you "Elegance"
The formal will take place next week, Saturday Nov. 22 @ the Alumni House from 9 PM - 1AM. Tickets will be sold at the Campus Center next week, Monday - Friday @ 11-7. $8 for individuals or $12 for couples in advance or $10 for individuals or $15 for couples at the door.

ASC Winter Formal is probably the best formal ever. It's going to be bangin' :]

Honestly though, every one always have such a good time - it's a great event, and always fun to see people dress up and look hot. Bring a friend (you don't need a date) and be prepared to have an amazing night!

ASC Meeting Minutes for 11/03/08

Meeting minutes

ASC Date Auction Feedback (What was good/bad & What could have been changed):

• MC should keep things moving, not have so many awkward pauses and not be too embarrassing
• Turn out was pretty amazing and we were able to raise a
  
• Next time we cosponsor events, we need to make sure the work is divided evenly between the organizations
• Mixed feelings about the circular tables (I personally liked them...but probably need more seating?)
• More decorations because the place was kinda boring looking
  
• Starting bid was too high
• Sparkling cider & cake was good

Winter Formal:

• Cosponsoring with HCO and the SA Diversity Initiatives
  
• Will take place on Saturday, Nov. 22 @ the Alumni House
• Tickets will go on sale the week of the formal (possibly even 1.5 weeks in advance). Tickets sold in advance will be priced at $8 (individual) and $12 (couple). Tickets sold at the door will be priced at $10 (individual) and $15 (couple). This year, we are thinking about going to every organization's meeting to sell tickets.
  
• Organizations should sign up for ticket selling. Will get that out to everyone soon.
• THEMES. NAMES. IDEAS. CLICK HERE: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=4JNmte7JUZ4R1lagrn9Mtw_3d_3d
  
• How can we make the formal better? Ideas: Professional photography or even just some type of backdrop. Better food choices? (appetizers)
  

Horizons

• Will take place on Saturday, April 4th @ the SC Commonwealth
• Still want to continue with the play type format as opposed to a skit and dances. Want to have it tied together in well, so it's cohesive and not choppy. Possible sequel from last years - students go study abroad and the problems they need to deal with when they return "home"
• Need to organize a Horizon's committee
• Need a writer that can possibly put everything together
• More AV/film segments

Possible Events for Next Semester (or in the future):

• Huge Fusion Dance performance
• Bring Yellow Rage back?
• Speakers --
  

Memories of iLL-Literacy

(This entry was originally written on November 2nd, 2008, but I was never able to finish it because I got...distracted. ANYWAYS.)

Wow. Simply wow.

The iLL-Literacy concert was an event to truly remember and for those who came to watch them on November 1st at the College of William & Mary, it is without a doubt that all of the audience members left the auditorium with one of the sickest, freshest performances this campus has to offer.

So where did it all begin?

Jessica Wu and I attended ECAASU last year at Cornell University and iLL-Literacy was one of the performers for that massive event. Suffice to say, I loved every minute of it, from the hiliarious "Text Messaging" to the brutal "Self-Hatred's Soliloquy"





I also need to make a note that after iLL-Literacy finished their performance, a friend and I snuck backstage and got a picture with them as well as getting all of their autographs. That was tight. But going on with the story...

About half a year later, little did I know that the formerly known UCAB was bringing iLL-Literacy to the College of William & Mary. Since Jessica Wu was also the co-president of ASC and the fact that many of their members are of Asian descent, it made sense to have a co-sponsorship with ASC. Along with the Office of Multicultural Affairs, IPAX (the International Performance Arts eXchange) was brought onboard and had the permission to create an opener for the event. Everything was in place.

Since I'm writing this nearly 3 months after the event happened, I can say that the audience participation was not as high as we had expected. But the more important thing is that the people who did attend, everyone loved it and after the show, all of us could not wait to get the performers' autographs and talk with them in general.



What was even better was that the group wanted a place to hang out and have fun, and eventually Michael Paik, our very own ASC treasurer, agreed to host the party at his place. Suffice to say, good times were to be had by all who were able to come.

iLL-Literacy

Along side with UCAB and IPAX, ASC is bringing spoken-word group iLL-Literacy to the WM campus, Saturday, November 1 @ SC Commonwealth 8 PM


Here's their description on their website:

In the age of empty words—where millions log in to comment on videos of iguanas skateboarding, where entire television series’ are based on who can blurt out the most grotesque diss on someone’s mother, where there exists such a thing as cell phones for babies, it seems everyone has something to say. But who’s really listening?

Enter iLL-Literacy—a collective of poets, emcees, and all-around fresh individuals—with a mission that seems simple enough: to have something to say, and for people not only listen, but want to listen.

Call it spoken word, call it hip-hop theater, but never call it typical, the crew consists of Adriel Luis, Dahlak Brathwaite, Nico Cary and Ruby Veridiano-Ching—four artists who harbor impressive accolades in their own rights. Since the four officially debuted their tour as a collective at the American University of Paris in 2005, iLL-Literacy has swept the corners of the globe with a delicious blend of lyrical verse, innovative theatrics, and an addictive approach to audience interaction that has kept the crew traveling nonstop.

iLL-Literacy has covered much ground in a short time, rocking stages from off-Broadway New York to London’s Picadilly, to its home base in the California Bay Area. News of the amazing talent has drawn attention from HBO’s Def Poetry and MTV, as well as crowds who have witnessed the collective share the stage with the likes of Common, Mos Def, KRS-One, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

iLL-Literacy’s hot, and only getting hotter. ‘Nuff said.

ASC Date Auction

Sorry I neglected this blog during the Date Auction planning process this year...I'm going to try to make up for it now so that ASC can have a better reference in the future :]

The ASC Date Auction is our biggest fundraiser for the entire school year. It's actually our only fundraiser that we have. Most of the money goes to fund our annual winter formal, but we also give a certain percentage of the profits to a charity. Traditionally every organization would provide a few members for auction. It isn't exclusive to just members of ASC organizations -- people that aren't part of ASC can also sign up to get auctioned off. Most people do a short talent and then get auctioned off afterwards.

This year, AAMC approached us and asked if they could co-sponsor with us. Usually AAMC has their own date auction, but unfortunately this year their date auction landed during homecoming weekend. Honestly, October is quite a disaster month to be planning events - you have fall break, Green & Gold, Homecoming weekend and Halloween weekend. Our own date auction was on a Sunday evening which isn't really the ideal time for any event.

Co-sponsoring has it's pros and cons, so it was something to think over before rushing into any decisions... (Pros: Draw more people to the event, appeal to different audience, share responsibilities. Cons: Split profits, how to split the work up evenly, communications). At the end, we decided that we will split the money according to the respective members/representative that get auctioned off from each organization.

One of our main challenges was getting solicitations for the date packages this year. Well, I think it has always been a challenge in the past. It's no easy task to ask businesses to donate something. You don't always get to speak to the manager or to the person that is in charge of donations. Even if you leave the letters to give to the manager, they don't always end up where they should. Often the letters are forgotten and disregarded - because lets be honest, a charity date auction isn't the first thing on a manager's list of things-to-do. Basically, in the future, it would be better if the exec board start solicitating possibly in the start of the year...like August, so that you have time to return to all the businesses and remind them/make sure that the letter has been received by the right person. Mostly likely you would have to go back a second, third time. Also, we aimed at high-classed restaurants this year because in the previous year, we thought the date packages weren't really 'quality' dates. However, we also limited ourselves by going to higher-classed restaurants. So basically...need to find a good balance. We had to do a lot of impromptu date packages at the end, and we had to spend some of the money, but it turned out ok at the end I think.

The set up of the date auction turned out pretty well. A lot of people thought having the tables was a lot more intimate and not as awkward with rows of chairs, which was also a bonus. We intentionally set up the tables because we decided to have finger foods and drinks this year.

Overall, the date auction seemed to turn out ok, which is a huge relief for me. We ended up making $1500, 500 more than our target $1000. Even after we split the profits up with AAMC, we had around 1200 left over for ASC. We also donated 10% of the profits ($150) to the Karen G Komen Breast Cancer, which was fantastic :]

Thanks to Tyler Hudgins, who is kinda amazing and decided to cosponsor with us this year. I'm sure he's glad he doesn't get 10 emails from me per day.
Obviously, everyone on the exec board...Se won, who's always got my back. Mike who was AMAZING and worked totally hard to get all the auctionee information and music and all that stuff, together. Ben and Eddy wrapping everything else and moral support.
Our MCs Tymon Francis and Koji Ukai
All our auctionees cause it takes a lot of balls to get up there and get auctioned off

Ok. That is all from me.

Til next time-

ASC Forum / phpBB

I set up the forums, and it's linked on the website now. It's at the bottom right hand corner, and located on the web at http://hostedboard.com/?mforum=asianstudentcou

It would be a decent place to discuss things without having to actually meet ... just a suggestion. It's available to all to use, and if you want something from it, such as another board to write on or whatever, then just email me.

so/AsianStudentCouncil

The ASC site is a bit functional...

It's been online for a while, actually, I just haven't had too much time to update it. I still have a bit on my to do list, including a lot of the multimedia content and scheduling information. After that is cleaning up a lot of the format, but otherwise it's a pretty good indicator of its future direction.

My intention is that your presidents and secretaries can more directly inform you of the going-ons of ASC, so having it pull directly from this blogspot makes it easy for them to offer you content.

I hope you like it, and if you don't I offered a link to Mark's old site on the home page.

Visit it at http://www.wm.edu/so/asianstudentcouncil

ASC Welcome Back BBQ + Field Day = ASC Tailgate!

After all the meticulous planning for the ASC BBQ throughout the summer and through the start of the semester - it was sad to see it go down the drain (well, not all of it) due to the ferocious "hurricane" Hannah. That hurricane was a total joke but it did leave the grounds sufficiently wet and I'm sure no one would have wanted to sit/play on wet grass.

So after very last minute planning, ASC BBQ was transformed into ASC Tailgate. Personally, I did not expect to have such a good turn out for such a last minute planned event and lack of publicity (moral of the story..? jk....) But in the end I think around 70 people showed up! A lot of familar faces and also quite a few new people as well, which was fantastic. Most of the food was gone by 5:30 and overall, I think everyone had a relatively good time, so thanks everyone for showing up! Special shoutout to everyone that came to help out :]

Some things to watch out for next year:
- Book a rain location
- Buy more drinks, cookies and chips

Right now the ASC Exec Board have started the outline of our annual Date Auction. It's our biggest fundraiser (our only one actually) for the whole academic year. Most of the proceeds will be used to hold the Winter Formal, which is going to be at the end of November. 10% of the money will raise will go to charity.

More to come on the Date Auction!

9/1/08 Minutes!

Whatsup everyone. This post is just announcing the minutes and informing those who weren't there with us about what happened and what we talked about. Here it goes.

Welcome to the First ASC Meeting of the Year 2008-2009!
Fellow ASC heads and organization leaders introduced themselves, as well as the new faces such as the freshmen and transfers. I believe it could have been a record turnout for ASC.

We then presented the ASC mission statement, which can also be found in the ASC website - http://web.wm.edu/so/asianstudentcouncil/about/index.html -

First topic: ASC BBQ + Field Day
Date:Saturday, September 6, 2008
Time:1:00pm - 5:00pm
Location:Yates Field

We asked all of the organizations within ASC to donate $20 for the event. Previously, the organizations helped us out by bringing dishes, but we believed that a simple donation would be ultimately cheaper and more efficient.

Grilling time starts at 12 and lasts until 2:30. there were 10 spots for 5 shifts at the grill, and were all filled up within about 7 minutes! talk about dedication.
here are the shifts:

12:00 - 12:45 Juae, Thuy, Mike
12:30 - 1:15 Ray, Preston
1:00 - 1:45 Sam Davis, Mike
1:30 - 2:15 Steven, Amanda
2:00 - 2:45 Uriah, Soojin

Setup Crews/Cleanup Crews
ASC Exec Board, Sonam, Usmaan, Agatha, Kevin, Kang, Justin, Bryan Neva, Esther, Kristen, Adam Wong.
*Also, people are always welcome to help out either for setup or cleanup. Besides, what can be more fun?

There will be an activities meeting for several people to manage the activities and decide what is best for everybody and what will provide the most fun. If anyone is interested, please email bjyoo@wm.edu (Ben Yoo) and he will definitely get everyone together for brainstorming and also putting things down on paper.

NEXT TOPIC
The Persian Student Organization has requested becoming part of ASC. We presented the idea to the other organizations, and have given them until next meeting to vote on the inclusion of PSO into ASC. ASC Orgs, please have your answer by the next meeting. PSO will be present in the next meeting to introduce themselves as well.

Third Topic
Other Upcoming Activities:
Date Auction – Oct. 19
iLL-literacy – Nov. 1
Winter Formal – Nov. 22

Last Topic:
We have moved the meeting time for ASC to 7pm in Washington 305. ASC will meet bi-monthly, with reminder emails prior to each meeting.

That's it. Hope everyone enjoyed the meeting, and for those who couldn't come, we hope to see you next time. Till then, enjoy the school year! :)

ASC

ASC Welcome Back BBQ/Field Day and...

HI EVERYONE!
HOPEFULLY EVERYONE IS HAVING A KICKASS SUMMER SO FAR & KEEPING COOL, CAUSE IT IS HAWT!

yeah, i just spelt hot, hawt..

Anyways, your amazing ASC exec board have already started planning for the amazing events next semester. We thought it would be nice to move the planning to the blog for more discussion; totally opened for suggestions, criticism, random comments whatever. It is probably easier for the exec board to carry discussions here instead of getting 10 page emails.

First event of the year is the ASC Welcome Back BBQ + Field Day...(and potential after party cough). It will be held on Saturday Sept. 6, 12-6 PM @ Yates Field.

This is a bit of a summary from the first email I sent out, merged with the comments I got back:

People: I think we have all to a agreement that we are going to try to make this as BIG as possible. It should be a great opportunity for everyone to get together and just chillax, talk about summer flings whatever. One of the major problems we are running into is estimating how many people we anticipate to come. TJ said around 60 people showed up last year (coming and going, not all at once). I want to aim for 100 people but I am not sure if this is a over-estimate or what. So if anyone else has a good...grasps of how many people would show up, that would be great. Also, since we are obviously going to try and target the freshmen class, we need the freshmen to actually come out. Did any of you guys go to any ASC events as freshmen? Cause I didn't...
Ben Yoo came up with a pretty sweet idea for freshmen - we can have sort of a buddy system going on, assigning a active ASC member (or whoever wants a freshmen i guess) to a freshmen (that they can facebook stalk/already know) and drag them along to the event. We all know how shy they are, so this is just so that they feel a big more comfortable going to a random BBQ.

FOOD: The usual list of Burgers (with Buns), Hot dogs (with Buns), Salad/Coleslaw, Potato Chips/Other junk food and of course having vegetarian burgers and hot dogs. If there's something else people want, please drop a note or something. (I just thought of cookies. we all like cookies right?)
In the past, every organization has contribute with a type of food. I want to continue with this tradition and I don't think it should be too expensive. However, Ben mentioned that because the BBQ will be a bigger event than previous years, each organization might not have money to contribute, because it isn't in their planned budget. I think most organizations should have spare money though, because we all know student organizations can't really depend only on the money the school gives. Once we have a estimate of how many people, we can have a better estimate with how much the food is going to cost. I don't think each organization will have to pay too much for food, but we can set a budget and if it goes over that budget, ASC can probably reimburse. I think that sounds fair?

Grill Team/Clean-up Team/Staff: We don't want one person to do all the dirty work, so we'll try to get people to sign up for one or the other in advance. There's only 5 exec members and we are going to need help with this.

Field Day: We have a whole field, so this can be opened up to suggestions. Mike & Ben are going to plan the activities for the field day, but obviously it should be something most people want to participate. Can be a tournament whatever. Preferably the activity would not need too much equipment.

After party: I think most of us want a after party, different atmosphere, freshmen will probably be interested. If enough people are interested, ASC will try their best to make a after party happen. Biggest concern - venue. Where can we hold such after party? Is there anyone willing to host a after party? We can always try to book tazewell but from previous experiences, that hasn't always turned out that well because the space is too big and it feels empty and people are awkward. And if its off campus, we will need drivers. Once we figure out a venue, we can figure out about...other finer details.

SUGGESTIONS/COMMENTS PLEASE! The more feedback we get, the better event we can plan!


I hope everyone is excited, cause ASC is coming back with a bang. get stoked people.

E-Board Participation Check

This post is to check if everybody on the e-board got ben yoo's email suggesting meetings through blogger. If you got the email and are up for doing this, please comment saying so. i.e. "aye", "check", "yes", "here", "present", "wtf", etc.

if there are significant number of people participating, we'll proceed with actual meeting discussions :)

Deadline: July 2nd (1 week)

ASC Office Spring Cleaning 08'

Today was the first spring cleaning of the ASC Office since...who knows? It must have been a long time because that place is just screaming for some organization (ahaha...). Funny thing is, I am not a psycho-anal, organizational neak-freak but stepping inside that office gave me migraines every time...possibly from all the dust and scary disease's cooking in there. So I was so looking forward to this cleanup meeting for realzz.

We purposely scheduled the clean-up during the normal meeting time so that no one can really make a excuse not to be there. I have no idea why I thought we can organize that office in a hour, there was so much shit to toss out. The amount of eating utensils/plates/napkins etc that have built up over the years was OVERWHELMING. We probably have enough to last all 6 organizations for 3 years or something. No jokes. The grossest stuff we found had to be that Gatorade bottle still have full with mold, the bag of rice that had to be like 10 years old and lots of expired snacks...mmmm

I haven't figured out what is the best way to organize things on such a large scale. It's hard when people leave every year and the transitions are done in such a hurry. Things get lost in translation and basically the piles and piles of stuff in the office seems to be all the result of it. It was great seeing pictures, programs of the events clubs have held in the past...like a bizarre time machine sucking you in. I found pamphlets of ASC when it was actually called Asian Student Union where they had all these different clubs (for example VSA wasn't formed yet) which was just weird to think of.

One day maybe the office could actually be turned into a office instead of a storage space, something Ben Yoo really wants to do. Right now it looks a bit difficult, but maybe one day...

I guess it is a bit of the Asian influence within me...cleaning to greet the new year and hoping for a better start. Fingers crossed.

Updates on the APAS Program

I have great news for everybody in terms of the progress with the Asian Pacific American Studies program initiative.

Professors Leisa Meyers, Jacqui McLendon, Rani Mullen, and Hiroshi Kitamura have all agreed to be on the Faculty Group for APA Studies. We have enough faculty to get started!! Professor Francis Tanglao-Aguas is sending the May seminar proposal so this idea is moving at a lightning quick pace.

I am incredibly excited for things to come in the future...

Asian Pacific American Studies Forum etc

Yay!!! ASC finally launched their first blog in WM history (and we all know how long that is) today! How totally exciting :]

Props for Andrew Chan giving me the idea when he started the CSO blog on xanga. I think Bryan Neva also had the idea but I guess we beat him to it-

This place functions primarily as a electronic document/record for ASC, but it also serves as a forum, a place for discussions, comments and feedback. Basically, it can be whatever we want and what we want to make of it. Heck, who knows what's going to happen to this site, whether we all actually make an effort to maintain it and whether this idea is actually cool. Even if no one reads this, it'll hopefully be a great way to document the progress of ASC. So here we go...


Today we had our first Asian Pacific American Studies forum (Tyler 102, 5-7 PM). Technically, it was not hosted by us but something that was first initiated by Eddy Hong and Stacey McDermott.

Basically, we want to see if it was possible to begin an APAS program here at William & Mary - whether or not there was a interest and more importantly, a demand. Apparently alumni from the past have thought of the idea to start a APAS program but it never got carried out. It was not well documented; could have been transitional problems, lack of interest, support funds etc. It would have been good to see why it never worked out so that we can make sure it worked out this time.

Not too many people came out, but thats ok, we weren't really expecting too many people. Around 4 professors came out, along side a handful of students. Eddy and Stacey along with Professor Francis Tanglao Aguas lead most of the discussion. We touched on some very important issues, mostly funding and logistical problems we might be running into, faculty support and what kind of classes we have now that could be used to start a APAS program.

What I thought was most relevant to us, as students is how much interest and support we have towards building a APAS program. Essentially, this is something that is very relevant to us because without our support, there would be no point in a APAS program. More importantly, once we show our support and start filling those classes, how to maintain this interest so that the program can survive in the future. So that people will want major in APAS from WM. Thinks like that-

There's so many things I didn't touch on but there is so many things to think about. This is a pretty big project and more long-term than short (even though there are short term plans) but today's discussion was very informative and it gave me a better 'structure' in my mind of how I think about the APAS, what is going on and what are professors, administrators and students alike are doing to make this work.

What do you guys think?

Contributing is fun

Everyone should do it

Testing~