I've been in ASUW since my freshman year, starting as a Hall Senator representing Lander Hall, then as a Senate liaison to the Finance & Budget Committee my sophomore year, and then as the Operations Coordinator for the whole association my junior year. Student Senators represent the official opinion and voice of the students and there are typically over 100 active senators at any given time in the year. As a Hall Senator, I was a "designated seat" saved for representing my residence hall. This also meant I was involved in the Residential Community Student Association (RCSA) and would meet frequently with other Hall Senators. As the Operations Coordinator, I was a paid employee of the association, serving as an administrative assistant to the Finance & Budget Director and as a key historian, parliamentarian, and front desk representative. I mostly worked with the Finance & Budget Committee but also did projects for the President, VP, and Personnel Director when needed. I also got the chance to participate in Hiring Committees, which was a unique experience that not a lot of students can say they have.  

Collaboration: Collaboration was huge in my roles in ASUW. ASUW is comprised of 25+ "entities" or departments, and the Finance & Budget Committee oversees the spending of all $1.4M allocated in the budget. I had to collaborate with other Senators when writing and amending legislation, collaborate with other F&B Committee members, and had to collaborate with many other employees throughout my time as Operations Coordinator. See the image below of the ASUW Birthday Party— while I spearheaded the planning and logistics of this event, I was able to enlist help from my coworkers to hand out hundreds of cupcakes to students for free. I had to collaborate with the F&B Director when creating agendas for our meetings, communicating with the committee members, and acting as a liaison with the RSOs we worked with when allocating the Special Appropriations Fund (special money for RSOs to use on large-scale events). 

Responding to Ambiguity: In my role as Operations Coordinator, I had a pretty open-ended job description and very little direction from my predecessor (he became my supervisor, so he figured he could just answer questions and didn't leave me any transition materials). Because of this ambiguity and the changing nature of ASUW, I had to learn very quickly how to adapt to changing plans and move forward with little to no information and direction. The ASUW Birthday Party, was the 2nd ever event of its kind and therefore had a lot of creative freedom and liberties when planning it. However, this also meant a lot of ambiguity on what the event "should" look like. I managed to pull together a very cohesive event where even Dubs made an appearance! 

Follow-Through: This job was tough. Politics is hard to be involved in, especially as a Business major with little to no academic applications of the work I was doing. It's messy working for a student government organization, especially when you're the person who is supposed to know everything and everyone (kind of like a walking ASUW encyclopedia). There was a lot of relational, political, and bureaucratic drama throughout the year and like many of my coworkers, I wanted to quit (it is true that student government is criminally overworked and underpaid). However, I knew that I had made a commitment to be the Ops Coordinator for the 2022-2023 school year. I had signed a contract, formed all of these relationships, and was doing the work. People depended on me. I needed to grit my teeth and stick it out even though it was difficult. And you know what? In the end, I was glad I stuck it out as I was able to leave my mark in small but effective ways that would eventually make everyone else's lives easier (I created a transition document template that was very in-depth and attempted to house all of the institutional knowledge needed to succeed). If i had quit when I first considered it, the ASUW Birthday Party wouldn't have happened, some poor soul would have had to be hired last minute, and I would have left everyone in the dust. I didn't owe them anything, but I knew it was against my character to just quit when I knew I could stick it out and (pridefully) that I was the best person for the job.    

I've been involved in the Asian Business Student Association for 3 years, two of which I've served as an Exec officer as the Community PR Director and this year as the Vice President. ABSA has been a cornerstone in my college experience as many of my closest friendships started there. ABSA is a Foster-affiliated affinity RSO (meaning it's a designated diversity RSO) that empowers Asian students interested in Business to create community and develop professionally. I often used ABSA as an organizational behavior case study in my HR classes because of the diverse work styles the execs have and the way that the leadership (President, VP) leads. 

Collaboration: Collaboration is key when planning social and professional events for students to enjoy. Whether that's collaborating together as execs or collaborating with guest speakers or other student groups, collaboration is essential. As the Community PR Director, I was often reaching out to other RSOs, Foster/UW alumni, and other community members. This meant a lot of coordination, communication, and collaboration to ensure that events would go smoothly for everyone involved. As VP, collaboration meant working with different execs to ensure events were planned out and jobs were properly delegated.

Group Development: As the VP, I engaged a lot in group development while trying to ensure our team would gel well together. The President and I started off the year by leading our team in creating SMART Goals and checking in on them once a quarter to see if we were keeping to them. A lot of meetings between me and the President were about our group dynamics and whether or not there were areas for improvement that we could tackle regarding our team's understanding of shared goals and commitments. We often joke that our execs are #ABSAAboveAll since we are all so dedicated and hardworking for ABSA's sake. The President and I tried to encourage as many bonding opportunities as possible, and this really helped us work together as a team since we ended up becoming really close friends. 

Supervision: This is one of my first supervisory roles and I was pleasantly surprised by the challenge of it. It seems easy to just provide people with direction but adapting to different work styles was a big challenge. Some people need their hand held throughout the process, some people want you to back off and only check on them when the task if finished. Some people want to give you updates every other day, some only when asked. Navigating these different relationships and balancing work priorities was a bit challenging but very rewarding as I'm not confident in my ability to not only lead a team but manage one effectively. I pride myself on my transparency and openness to questions as a leader.

Every undergraduate at the Foster School of Business has to compete in the MGMT 430 Strategy Development Case Competition as our capstone. This entails working with a real corporation who has a real business problem and working together in a team to develop realistic solutions and implementation strategies and present it to representatives of the company. This year's company partner was Starbucks and we were tasked with helping them attract and retain Gen Z and Gen Alpha customers. 66 teams competed and my team was actually one of 3 winners! We presented first to a panel of judges from the Seattle business community and then again to three representatives from Starbucks, including the Director of Brand Loyalty Marketing (which was equal parts exciting and terrifying for me as our designated marketing person).  

Collaboration: Collaboration was once again key in this class as I had to work very closely with my team. We spent 8 hours a week together on average for the whole quarter and I practically didn't know any of them until we became a team. I had to work closely with my teammates to ensure that we were able to create a comprehensive presentation that covered all the bases. There was a lot of decision-making that needed to be made and we had to work together to come to a consensus on the best course of action. All-in-all, this was the biggest group project and presentation of my life thus far. 

Personal Contributions: I stand out like a sore thumb in my group for many reasons. Not only am I the only person of color or woman, but I am also the only non-Finance or Accounting major. My personal contributions to this group were significant as I was the only Marketing/HR-focused person on our team. All questions or tasks related to marketing immediately went to me. I knew my strengths were in marketing and so did my team and we were able to leverage that to the max. I let them handle the numbers, I did the people strategy. 

Productive Relationships: I mentioned earlier that I didn't really know my teammates prior to this project. I had worked with one of them briefly over a year ago on a small MKTG 301 (Concepts of Marketing) project but I had never met the other three. They were all friends and I only joined their group after they had asked a pool of potential groupmates if anyone was a marketing major, and I stepped in because I still needed a group and was in fact, a marketing major. I knew that we would be spending a lot of time together so I was really intentional in getting to know each of my teammates and being able to reach a level of familiarity where we could joke around with one another and really have effective meetings because we weren't afraid of speaking up. I'm so glad to have met these guys and really can't imagine having worked with anyone else, as strange as it is.