FRAS 2013: Resident Assistants go to Neverland.
There are a lot of really awesome things about being a resident assistant at Florida Tech. You get to meet new people and there’s this instant sense of camaraderie between everyone. You gain real leadership and work experience. But most of all, you have fun.
One thing that happens every year is the Florida Resident Assistant Seminar (or FRAS), which took place at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville this year. FRAS is an annual RA conference for RAs at Florida universities. There are skits, workshops, a social and an awards ceremony. Florida Tech has won the Spirit Cup the last two years and we hoped to win for a third year. This year, I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the delegates for Florida Tech. We had to prepare for the conference, first, and there was a lot of work to be done.
Since part of the FRAS conference is also a competition, we had to jump in immediately with posting on Facebook and Twitter to gain spirit points before the conference. Every day, we would flood the Internet with posts, pictures and videos like the one below, where we were so excited we could cartwheel.
We had a lot of fun with the pictures and videos, and did whatever came to mind. One RA had the idea to spoof the Jared jewelry commercial while others made a fun monster video.
We also raised money for UNF’s charity, the Wolfson’s Children Hospital, through fundraisers on campus such as Pie an RA, Water Balloon an RA, Custom Buttons and Tattoo an RA.
We also made things to exchange with other schools. We made letters, decorated clothespins and made buttons with our theme, Peter Pan (the conference theme was “Once Upon a FRAS”).
The last thing we had to do before our conference was create a skit, which was supposed to be related to Resident Life and to our theme. For our skit, we all were given a role as a character from Peter Pan. I played Wendy and another blogger and fellow RA, Tito Miranda, was the Crocodile. We also had a narrator, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, Lost Boys (one of which was a girl), Indian Chief and Captain Hook.
Finally, Feb. 8 arrived. Our skit was looking great, everything was finished and our workshop presentations were ready to rock. FRAS was here. We boarded the vans and headed to Jacksonville. After being stuck in traffic, we arrived at UNF. Once there, we changed into our costumes and performed our skit during roll call at dinner. We had a great time that night. We were our usual loud, obnoxious selves as we cheered on the other schools after they performed their roll call skits.
The next day was our workshop day. Florida Tech presented five of the workshops there, so that was pretty impressive. We kept our same spirit and energy up through the second day and made friends with a lot of people, particularly those from FS. One of our old resident directors goes to school there now.
That night was the awards ceremony. While we didn’t win the Spirit Cup like we had hoped, we did win Funniest Roll Call. The odd part? I’m not disappointed or upset at all. I’ve said this a lot since coming back home, but we all still felt like we won. We all had an amazing time and we put so much into this that no award could ever really make or break the experience. As always, we did Florida Tech proud because of our energy, personality and sportsmanship J Go Florida Tech!
