Third Year in Review

This past year, I was the Director of a Bollywood fusion dance competition here at UC. Midwest Dhamaka (MD) is one of many dance competitions hosted by universities and cities around the country as part of the Bollywood fusion dance circuit. 8 collegiate dance teams travel from all over to compete in these competitions, and I, along with my Co-Director Aanika Garre, and our executive board, planned the competition hosted by UC. The weekend-long competition consists of three events; the Mixer event which we held at Nippert West Pavillion, the Competition at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, and the After Party Saturday night at Bogart's. Midwest Dhamaka hosted over 300 dancers from schools like Georgia Tech, Ohio State, Cornell, Purdue, and more. My Co-Director and I also managed an executive team of over 20 students and a liaison/staff team of over 50 students.

 

This was one of the most rewarding experiences to date during my college career. Being a leader of 60+ students of varying ages and dance circuit experience was extremely rewarding and taught me so much about leadership, organization, conflict resolution, and collaboration. Beyond the skills I developed while in this role, I also found a passion for event planning and leadership. I am very comfortable with my leadership skills and abilities and can apply what I learned in my future professional role. Planning three events over the course of one weekend and managing a large team throughout the school year is not easy, but it was made so much better by the people I had the opportunity to work with. MD has given me some of my best friends and grew me as a person in ways I didn't know were possible. I had a lot of personal and professional growth with this experience, and I am only continuing to grow.

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Aanika and I are directing next year's competition as well, and have already selected our next executive board. We are very excited to continue our progress from last year's competition and apply what we learned while planning last year.

 

My goal for MD this year is to expand our reach on campus and get more students involved. We are expanding our roles to include over 30 exec board members, 10 staff members, and 27 liaison members. This means a larger group to lead, but also a more variety of involved students. I also want to focus on bonding for our team. We are naturally a close group, but there was a divide between our exec team and staff. We select our staff later in the fall, and they have separate meeting times and different responsibilities. We do big group bonding a few times, but not enough for our groups to fully get to know each other throughout the year. We can definitely focus on big group engagement more, and because of this, we have implemented an overlap time between our exec and staff meetings for 30 minutes which is just set aside for bonding. This will hopefully reduce the divide and power dynamic that came into play at times throughout the actual weekend, where exec members felt "above" the staff members which created issues. 

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Overall, I am very excited for the upcoming year and can't wait to apply what we learned last year to this year's competition to make it even better. I have loved contributing so much to the experience of our team members, and I have gained so much more from them in return. I have attached a video of the competition day montage one of our staff members made of MD, which captures the essence of what show day looks like in the Bollywood fusion dance circuit!

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