Board meetings this summer have been both frequent (once a week) and highly productive. Chapter vice president, Binh Nguyen and I have come back from Grassroots in Washington DC almost brainwashed with a thousand exciting ideas that we want to implement. But, as the current AIAS chapter president at Cal Poly, whom has gone to the yearly conference before, advised, we have to take it slow and let the ideas come play naturally. So, as Binh and I have done just that; Although we are quickly ramping up in preparation for the new school year with propositions passed and denied, we are also slowly building the confidence in our board members as we are all new at this. By finding our natural strengths and interests, we are slowly shifting around committee positions that fit us best.

    The quick of it... So far in the past four weeks this summer, we have built and voted on an entirely new campaign for marketing our chapter. This includes an entirely new look complete with a custom made logo that our past president, Anna Mezheritskaya, had ordered for us last year. We’ve used the logo for a few things. Letterheads, facebook and our website that has finally been updated after two years. But more than that, it’s been completely rebuilt from scratch, by your truly. The original idea for layout came from Binh as he was in charge of rebuilding the website. However, since I’ve had experience building websites and he hadn’t, we decided that I would use his layout idea and start building the site since the school year was approaching fast and we wanted to be live before the school year started. So, we’re going to meet with our head of the architecture department at West Valley, Dr. Gharamani to discuss our website with him to make sure there aren’t too many redundancies between his department website and ours. More to come on those results next week. Aside from using our logo on our new website, we’ve also used the logo with an ingenious business card layout created by Binh.

    Funny story about the business card... When Binh presented the layout to the board we all loved it immediately. One side of the card he placed our logo and pertinent information about how to contact us. On the opposite side of the card he kept it simple; He placed a three-word motto for our club. The first letter of each of the words was in bold type, when read together said, L I E. Our Treasurer, Megan Siah, pointed this out immediately and we all started laughing. So we broke into a brainstorming session ti give Binh some ideas on a new motto that would inspire trust and not LIEs. Seeing that our business cards will be completed on time before the school year we have also updated our bylaws and created a calendar for the fall semester.

    During our last meeting, we voted on updating our bylaws that don’t require the president, that’s me, to have to attend and be representative at every function that the chapter partakes in. This is mostly due to the fact that after I created a preliminary calendar for the fall, and then the board voted on adding more events into calendar, the chapter will be involved in multiple events at the same time. On top of the obvious that I can’t be in two places at once, The board felt that it is a little too stringent on the president to take on such a responsibility anyway. Our calendar is so full this semester that it appear that at least once a week we will be involved in doing one thing or another: from volunteering at Habitat for Humanity, to fundraising at AIA Santa Clara Valley Chapter meetings with as many student affiliates as we can get to come, to holding portfolio crit events, to attending national conferences... phew... It seems like we are an ambitious bunch, however, we are also a motivated and responsible one too.

    Our new Inter Club Council (ICC) representative, Emily Romero, has take not only that responsibility, but has also taken on the task of chairing the committee on volunteering. She’s been diligently contacting organizations that we’ve work with in the past to get our calendar better situated. In past board meetings, Emily had stated that she blogs and loves being on the internet. So, during our last meeting I showed her that we can create a newsletter on our website that people can subscribe to just like a blog. Actually it is a blog feature, we just like calling it a newsletter. After showing her this, I asked her if she’d take the lead and chair the committee on our chapter newsletter; She gladly accepted. Not all board members had the opportunity to show their stuff however.

    Our original treasurer, Malachi Payne, had to drop out the treasurer position and as our large events chair for reasons of having to move out of the state. On the positive side, Megan has taken her time to think it over the last few weeks to carefully considered and accept the honorable position of treasurer. Yay! X D Congratulations, Megan! This is in conjunction with her original position of Student Liason to the AIA SCV Committee on the Environment (COTE). And although I tried to relieve her of some of these duties, she insisted on also being Co-Chair of Marketing with Binh and me. Let’s not forget a big part of organization, chapter vice president, Binh.

    Binh has been amazing from the start. I knew just talking to him as vice president that he is, has, and will be an invaluable partner. He know the architecture program better an any of the rest of us board member. He’s an experienced, friendster as he pushes himself beyond his personal comfort zone to be sociable. Also, seeing that Binh is a natural when it comes to mentorship I asked him to take the lead on that program. Recently, he has created and hosts an origami group on his personal time with the Martin Luther King San Jose Library, where he shows kids the wonders of creating fierce three dimensional creatures out of plain two dimensional paper. At Grassroots, he has expressed intense thought and interest about creating a mentorship program in our school that is unified with studio culture. He took it upon himself to write a letter to the architecture department to see if we can find a way to extend studio hours past normal class times to architecture students working on intense and large projects with some form of security access. What a group of leaders they are.

    With a crew as passionately committed as we are to serving an organization that we truly believe in, this year is probably going to be the best year ever, for AIAS West Valley College. I can’t wait to see who joins in, but more importantly, who takes advantage of all that this organization has to offer. it’s great to see the evolution of a member go from participant to leader as well. During this school year, I will be asking those actively involved to take a roll in leadership and/or support of leadership as it will be great practice for participation in next year’s board. An early congratulations to all of you whom join and take part in this great experiment we call AIAS West Valley College.

-    Mauricio Flores Ulloa

      2010-2011 Chapter President