Please notice this was first posted in the period 2012-2014 and can be outdated
At the beginning of the academic year we had a bonding trip to Hua Hin, where the main goal was to get to get drunk and get to know the people who will occupy the same classroom during the coming year a bit better. While some of the students of the class of 2011 were present during that trip, which is not strange since they co-organized the trip, we never had a good chance to get to truly know them better. To change this there will be another bonding trip coming up at the end of this month where both the classes of 2011 and 2012 will participate. To make the most of this bonding trip the activities leading up to this trip already started weeks ago.
Sasin assassin
All students of the classes of 2011 and 2012 are divided, maybe randomly maybe not, in 6 teams consisting of about 12 people from the 2011 class and 12 people from the 2012 class. As a team we have to fulfill some assignments, with which we can earn points, which will result in a ranking of the teams. The winning team will have first pick which CSR activity to do during the trip, the runner up second choice, etc. For once I was positively surprised when they explained the games, even though the rules of the games seemed to change a little in the first few days if I compare the interpretation of the rules people walked away with from the initial announcement with the rules that were days later posted on Facebook.
An overview of the assignments to complete to earn point for the bonding trip CSR activity
In general there can be points earned in two different ways; on one hand we need to make group pictures at certain spots in Bangkok where we get one point for each team member visible in the picture, plus some opportunities to earn bonus points, and on the other hand there is an assassins game running for a week where we can kill each other in the hallways to earn points.
For the group pictures there are three assignments; one is to take a picture at a certain dessert place on Khao San road with 5 different desserts in the picture. This picture was rather easy to make since KSR is close to Sasin and not many people object to eating desserts. The group I was part of improvised that same day the solution for the second assignment, where we have to take group pictures with 5 living animals, by taking a picture with a soi dog on campus, a picture with a cat outside the dessert place on KSR, and 3 pictures with living sea animals at the place we went to next for seafood. The third and final assignment was to go to the movies with the whole group, and make a picture with all the movie tickets attached to each other. Due to other responsibilities I was unable to attend that part (costing my team one point) but I heard not that many groups took this assignment too serious anyways: some groups bought tickets for different movies at once so the tickets are still attached together but you don’t have to watch the movie together, while other groups just bought 20 tickets for the picture and then all went their own way not caring about the wasted 140 baht for a movie ticket they didn’t use.
The Sasin dog, who always hangs around the entrance of the building, was our first target for a picture with a living animal.
The assassin game is a rather original game I had never heard of before; apparently some Sasin students who went on exchange before learned about this game at another university and now brought it to Bangkok. In this game each group gets a list of names of people they can kill and one clothes peg. The point of the game is to find one of your targets and put the clothes peg on their clothes which kills that person. To stop possible discussions you are obliged to provide proof of your kill by taking a picture of the result or just videotaping the action with your mobile phone. Once you are killed you cannot kill others anymore and everybody is only allowed to kill one person from the target list. To make sure the game does not disrupt any of the classes there are some rules about where you can kill others and where not, which comes in essence down to that you are only allowed to kill in the hallways or the common room. Near the common room is also the score board where you can follow who killed who and who is still alive. For each survivor a team gets 1 point, for each dead team member one point is subtracted, and for each kill your team earns 2 points.
The scoreboard for the assassins game – when you kill somebody you cross out their name.
On Monday the 6thof August the end results were revealed on Facebook and my group, group 1, came in third mostly due to a disappointing score in the assassins game. Of course we did not went down without a fight and after whining and complaining about the scores, mostly done by me, the mistakes were spotted and due credit was giving for our killings putting us in the second position.
It is clear every group, except one, did their best on playing the games in the past weeks.
Now that the scores are in, each group can in turn decide on which of the CSR activity they want to do during one day of the bonding trip in Khao Yai. In general there are two types of CSR activities available, one is spending a couple of hours with school children; entertain them, teach them something, and try to keep them quiet, and the other is to revamp part of the school they go to.
An overview of the available activities and the preferences of each group.
To my surprise the learning activities were not the most popular with the ladies in our group, which I expected because kids are always cuuuuuute, so now we are supposed to do some revamp activities during the Khao Yai trip. Let’s see if we can get anything done in the limited time of 3 hours we have to do our stuff in that school.