Project Spotlight: RTA Family System

By Seong Jong Hong     9/28/11 7:00pm

Rice Taiwanese Association, a student-led organization that strives to spread cultural awareness and celebrate diversity on campus, has created a social system that provides what every student away from home misses: a sense of belonging to a family, being at home.

Two years ago, Hanszen College senior Kevin Ting and Brown College junior Tammy Hsu saw in a UT Austin's student organization how effective creating a family system could be, and implemented this idea the following year.

Each family, which is a group of RTA members sorted based on interests, has two family heads who act as advisors for the family members, and provide advice on classes, life and more; the family also consists of 20 members. These members now take part in activities and will spend time together for the rest of their years at Rice.

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According to McMurtry College senior Alvin Chou, the Co-President of RTA, RTA had students that came to the opening meeting fill out a survey and sorted students based on preferences, food outings, and activities or interests.

Starting up the newly created system proved challenging, Chou said.

"Some of the challenges were deciding the details of the system, just how many family heads we were going to have, how many members we were going to open this up to, and all the logistics like how to collect the questionnaire information," Chou stated.

According to Ting, now a Co-Internal Vice-President of RTA, this system has been true to its purpose and increased the retention rate of the new members each year. This fixed a problem: in previous years, many students would show up to join RTA, but would  drop off as the year went by, Ting said.

Creation of these units under the family system can create opportunities for a greater level of bonding.

"We have a lot of fun activities that we do as a family ourselves; and all the families come together for the RTA itself. So we had a scavenger hunt last week when we went to a Taiwanese festival," Ting said. "This coming week we have an Iron Chef competition where each family cooks two dishes; we hope that this sense of competition will increase members' participation in activities and the sense of family bonding."

According to McMurtry College junior Yian Lo, the Webmaster and Historian of RTA, a benefit from this increase in retention rate of new members is that more non-Taiwanese students will be exposed to Taiwanese culture.

Although RTA got the idea from a student organization in UT Austin, RTA still had to come up with the details from scratch, Ting said.

"We expect that if this continues to be successful, it will continue to grow in the future years so that when I graduate there will be an officer in charge of the family system who will have been groomed by the advisors to know everything about the system," Ting stated. "That officer in charge of the family system should know what works and what doesn't, and improve upon it."

For those who are interested in joining the Rice Taiwanese Association, visit their website at http://rta.rice.edu.   

"Project Spotlight" is a weekly feature that looks at student projects that are making a difference in the Rice Community.

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