Members were asked to think about one of two themes:
Each member is then asked to go to the whiteboard and write a topic based on those themes. Members are told that if they do not see anything on the board that interests them, then they better make something up for themselves. After the topics are written, the topics are then condensed by similarity (e.g. watching movies and scary movies are combined into movies). Then, everyone sees all the topics and are asked to put a tally mark (similar to Google’s PageRank™ system) next to topics that interest them.
About 20 students participated in this exercise.
The topics and the tally count for each, arranged by number of tally marks.
| Marks | Topic |
|---|---|
| 8 | Music |
| 8 | Videos, Movies, Filmmaking |
| 7 | Working with other VSAs |
| 7 | Sports |
| 7 | DoTA, Video Games |
| 6 | Art |
| 4 | Community Service |
| 4 | Vietnamese Culture |
| 3 | Friends |
| 2 | Animals |
| 2 | Family |
| 2 | Hip Hop |
| 2 | Relationship |
| 2 | Yarn |
| 2 | Rainbow |
| 1 | Cooking |
Personal expression and recreation ranks high on the list of things that members want to do, and to some extent, collaboration. Things that rank lower are relationships and learning about culture. Then there are miscellaneous topics such as animals, yarn, and rainbow can only be understood by the SOS Brigade allusion (i.e. Saving the world by Overloading it with fun Student Brigade).
It is to the organizer’s great surprise that culture shows and/or dancing wasn’t mentioned, since the VSA did not have a culture show this year.
Since there are already activities lasting until the end of the school year, this list would be a good start for next year’s elected cabinet. However, because new students are expected to come and some students are expected to leave, it would be good to do this exercise again at the beginning of the year. Another idea is to do this through a Taboo type of game that has become part of the VSA’s tradition.
After the list is generated, it would be a good idea, at each meeting from thereon, to have a more focused discussion among the members so that a possible plan of action could be generated.