February 27th, 2010. Asia Night is one of the largest, student-led events at Cornell University, featuring most of the Asian/Asian American-interest groups on campus. The event hosts numerous booths, each set up by a student-run organization, and features such performances as lion dance, Korean drumming, Filipino coconut dances, Bhangra, Chinese dance troupes, and much more. This year, at the 5th Annual Asia Night, SASE Cornell set up a fantastic booth as the only professional organization at the event!
The group running Asia Night, Cornell Asian Pacific Islander Student Union (CAPSU), was kind enough to provide $25 of funding for materials. The night before the event, the executive board plus a few members got together to put together all of the materials we had been planning and designing for a few weeks. We had lots of fun.
Since our chapter’s funding has been extremely limited, we made ample use of Cornell’s “free” resources and were able to print off beautiful SASE General Information brochures designed by one of our very own executive board members, Ritu.
At the event itself, we had an extensive “Puzzle Challenge” which consisted of various analytical, spatial/visual, and slitherlink puzzles as well as a challenge against a SASE member at connect 5 on a Go board. The puzzles were mostly to promote our StrengthsFinder Workshop, scheduled to take place in April. We also had flyers for the workshop.
All in all the Asia Night booth was a great success and helped us spread the word about SASE as well as generate interest in our upcoming events. Next up, a general body meeting on Thursday, March 4, 2010!
Regards from SASE Cornell! (Posted by: Vivian Lin, SASE Cornell 2010 Secretary)
I’m not sure if you have this at your school, but concerning the shortage of funds problem. Our school has an annual engineering career fair that’s done by a student organization and they have paid jobs for other organizations to do. Well I’m not sure if you guys have something like this, but it’s a good idea to find out if other bigger organizations have jobs they’re willing to pay for that you could do. If you need any advice I can ask our Treasurer to help you out…
Thanks for the tip! As far as I know, all of our career fairs are hosted by the University itself except for SWE career fairs but they get enough volunteers already. I haven’t heard of a system where bigger student orgs pay for help but we will certainly look into it.
We would greatly appreciate any advice the OSU Treasurer could give us! Our main problem is that SWE (Society of Women Engineers) has a huge hold on all of the corporate sponsors that visit CU and in recent years University funding for student organizations has become much more restricted.
My e-mail address is vl59@cornell.edu and our Treasurer’s address is kky6@cornell.edu.
Hey Jess and Vivian,
Great discussion. Something else we did for another org that I was apart of was a magazine sale. It was a little annoying to sell magazines, but you can make a ton of money if you hit your sales goals. We had 50 people but we were able to make like $3000 or something. So, even if you scaled it down you can make a good chunk of money.
The other thing was a flower sale during graduation. I forget the name of the company but they would provide the flowers, they just needed students to sell them. If I remember correctly they also offered a good deal of money.