Survey
Before I came to London, I searched about K-Pop society in London universities and learned about UCL K-pop society (https://www.instagram.com/uclkpopsociety/), KCL Hallyu K-pop society (https://www.instagram.com/kclhallyu/), etc. At the same time, I found that there was no specific K-Pop society in UAL, that was why I did not know where to go or what to join at first.
According to my research questions, I set up a questionnaire to investigate how much the students of the Chinese Student and Scholars Association (CSSA) know about the school’s dance society. The main respondents of this questionnaire are Chinese students who have joined the dance club of UAL’s CSSA.
If people say ‘yes’ to the first question, then it will goes to second question; if ‘no’, then the third one.
The questionnaire will end for the people choose “I don’t dance to K-Pop”, while go on for others.
The result of the survey is that, half of the people know that UAL has a Student Union dance club besides the dance club of the CSSA, but 80% of them do not join this dance club. Two thirds of the people who dance to K-Pop dancing know that other universities (such as UCL) have a specific K-Pop society. At the same time, two thirds of the people think that UAL needs a specific K-Pop society, instead of the current situation, Chinese students only dance to K-pop in the dance club of CSSA. (The bold one is the value from this questionnaire I think)
Interview
I learned that the K-Pop dance style in the dance club of the student union was founded by JT Yang, a graduated student, a Chinese girl who immigrated from China to London when she was 11 years old.
I reached out to JT and asked her why she founded this. She told me that she liked K-pop, but she found there was no K-Pop dance after she came to the UAL, so she founded it.
Then I asked her, “Why you just start this dance style in the dance club instead of creating a new K-Pop society like other universities?”
She said: “Because I only like K-Pop dance, I’m not interested in other things in K-pop, such as movies and dramas. At that time I was in Year 2, and my schoolwork was busy, so I just want to add one category to dance club.”
So I asked her if she knew about the Produce 101 event held by Reading University and the University K-Pop Society competition organized by KCL.
She said, “I don’t know about Produce 101 event. The reason why I didn’t participate in the University K-Pop Society competition because this was founded in the year of Covid. I also wanted to participate in some competitions, but there was no thing I could do.”
I shared the results of the questionnaire with JT, and said “See, there are people looking for someone to start a K-Pop society in UAL.”
But JT said “I already graduated, and you are gonna graduate, it is too late~~”
At the same time, I reached out to Kiki Lin, the person in charge of the dance club in CSSA, and asked the same question. She said she knew nothing about it. But after I told her these things, I could see from her words that she was very interested in them.
Addition: KCL held the University K-Pop Society dance competition in April this year. I discussed with Sunny Lee, one of the judges of the competition, that why UAL did not participate in the competition. He said maybe because UAL did not have a specific K-Pop Society.
In order to understand this easier, let’s see the picture below.
Here is my personal experience. In my undergraduate school (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), we have K-Pop dancing club and Kpop club. The two club have different functions, but from the classification of the names, it is easy to know that K-Pop club does everything about K-Pop except dancing, and K-Pop dancing club only works for dancing. I worked 1-year as the leader of the dance club and 3-year as a behind the scenes producer in K-Pop dancing club for my 4-year undergraduate life.
In fact, even now I still work as a senior planning people for them.
In London, except for the UAL without K-Pop society, the K-Pop society of these schools is equivalent to integrating the two associations of our undergraduate school. But from my observation, I think they put the emphasis on dancing as well, not much about other Korean stuff.
Addition:
Anyways, I uploaded “New idea” to Arts SU about this.
I got the feedback from the SU and they suggested me to open a new society.