Passing the baton

A few months ago, a new club was born at Darden, the Darden South Asia Society (DSAS). It took over a year’s worth of work in petitioning and designing the vision and mission of the club; but finally the approvals were obtained and we held elections to determine the first ever leadership team of DSAS. In the few months that we have been in the team, we have tried to give more direction to the club by holding events as promised in our petition but by also involving ourselves closely with the Career center and Admissions.

And then a few weeks ago, we held elections to select the team we would hand over to as we leave Darden. This weekend IJ, club president of DSAS hosted the present and future leadership team at his place for a “retreat” where the current team appraised the incoming team about our workings, events and vision. Tomorrow, we will hold our first weekly meeting with the new leadership, as we begin to hand over responsibilities to them.

One of the things we struggled with in our brief stint as the leadership team was choosing what we could achieve in the limited time before end of the year. We wanted to do everything, but often times we had to reign in our enthusiasm for the sake of practicality. It was great to hand over those ideas to the incoming team – unlike us they have a whole academic year to take the club a notch further.

In passing the baton over to the first year students, we are giving away something we planned and envisioned for the South Asian community at Darden. We wanted to create a club that not only organized the famous annual Bollywood Party or inter-school cricket tournaments but also one that provided career and academic support and mentoring to incoming South Asian students. But this was not a club targeted solely at the South Asians, as our membership list would testify. With the region becoming the hot bed of business, we wanted to use the club as a platform to help the greater Darden/UVA community understand the intricacies of doing business in South Asia. In my admittedly biased opinion, I believe we have achieved everything we set out to, and we still have events in the pipeline!

Here’s a memento IJ handmade for us – needless to say, it has the pride of place in my room.

For information on DSAS, visit our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter or contact us at dsas@darden.virginia.edu