In the early years of my undergraduate career, I had the opportunity to be one of the student leaders for Filipino Student Association at University of Florida, or UFFSA for short.

"What should we film?"

In my freshman year of college, I joined UFFSA solely because one of my friends dragged me into it. They had freshman program called MAFFIA that allowed freshmen to volunteer into some of the production FSA does, such as Multimedia, Culture, or Mass Communications, plus it was a way for freshmen to meet and work alongside upperclassmen as well as other freshmen. What I didn't take into account was how it ended up being like one of those summer days where you didn't want to do anything, so you ask everybody "What should we do today?", and when I signed up, I was appointed into Multimedia, and the daily question became "What should we film today?" This was when I made the most of my friends currently, as well as where I found joy being surrounded by creativity, as everyone would always pitch the most random and out-of-the-box ideas, and sometimes we all agreed on a silly idea and put in the effort to actually make the video, and eventually ending up being shown to the rest of the club during general body meetings, and everyone loved it. This environment of fast-paced (and budget) videography may possibly be the root of my spontaneous creativity I wield nowadays for almost everything I come across.

Mapua XVI

Let's fast-forward a bit. I loved being in a close-knit and creative environment so much that I ended up applying to be one of the Multimedia Chairs, who led and taught the MAFFIA committee everything about multimedia production. Soon after, I ended up as the Vice President of Multimedia, who delegated and made videos with the Multimedia Chairs under him/her. Consider the VP and Chairs the more official team of Multimedia, whereas the MAFFIA committee I started out from is the experimental/intern team of Multimedia, and I gave us a team name of Mapua XVI, derived from a famous university in Manila, Phillipines, as well as the year the team was founded (2016). Being the more official team to represent and be the face of the organization, we naturally rose our abilities to execute our ideas more persuasively through filmmaking and editing, as well as attempting more advanced ideas we thought was impossible given our budget and time constraints. Some of these videos were:

• Marketing an annual collegiate gathering, spanning to other FSA organizations across Florida and Georgia over the summer
• Impressing the incoming Asian-American Student Assembly class with what our organization stood for through live performance
• Advertising and recording the entirety of a state-wide modern dance competition hosted on our campus by yours truly
• Tugging at the heartstrings of the general student body with a 5-minute promotional of a light-hearted college romance

If the embedded links didn't play, just click on the title of the video to watch right on YouTube itself~