Hello! My name is Serena, and I am one of APASA’s Co-Internal Community Chairs!

Historically, APASA’s Tournament of Champions event was a field day that let the member organizations get to know each other better through friendly competition. This year, however, my co-chair Kimberly Phung and I decided we wanted to promote more intentional interaction (as well as to avoid the LA heat), and structured TOC as a reTreat of Champions! We planned breakout sessions and workshops, but of course we kept some outdoor activities.

After the initial ice breakers, where only one group of six successfully made that asian mom star pose (see right), we split the attendees up by which category their member org fell under. APASA’s member organizations are grouped into 5 categories - cultural, advocacy, academic/pre-professional, performance and Asian Greek Council. On Saturday, clubs were organized by categories to ensure that they each have personalized and relevant sessions. I personally sat in on the performance-based clubs (shout out Dragon Boat, your race is a performance of its own), and was pleasantly surprised by how open these member org representatives and their general members were in discussing their situations!

Once the breakouts were over, we all went back outside and ate lunch under the shade of some beautiful trees in Founder’s Park. Afterwards, general members and e-boarders were split up to go to different workshops. The e-boarders went to a workshop that went through what APASA initiatives were to help member organizations this year, a funding application run through, and a time to brainstorm new collaborations between orgs! The general members participated in both an advocacy/diversity workshop as well as an “APASA 101” session, where they hopefully got to learn about APASA’s overall role in USG and the APA community here at USC.

To end the day, we played a tournament of “Asa”, which is a Korean rhythm game, to compete for which team could get their iced Boiling Point tea first! Honestly, I was surprised at how good the final round people were, as I heard “aaasah mo-chi, aaasah slip-per” at such a fast speed :0 .

Anyhow, I kept asking the other APASA e-boarders on how their breakout sessions or workshops went. My heart went :’) when Richelle told me that one smaller cultural club asked how barbecues were planned, and how larger cultural clubs were eager to answer and help them out. I hope that if the attendees got anything out of TOC, is that they were able to start a connection with other clubs that they usually might not have exposure to.

reTreat of Champions 2019