Author: Anssel Nugraha ('24)
Photo Courtesy of Meng Zhen (Fallon) Lo (‘23)
There are so many traditions the seniors participate in, like sending out cookies during Valentines or taking over the senior store. However, one of the most anticipated events the seniors look forward to each year is the senior banquet. BAIS gives the juniors the opportunity to plan a senior banquet as a celebration of the seniors’ achievements and graduation from high school. The senior banquet is “a time to really honor the seniors and offer a blessing as we send them out into the world,” Ms. Melissa Hall, this year's junior class sponsor said. “I think it’s a nice time to get fancy and look our best and to honor the seniors.”
Every year, the juniors work hard to thoroughly plan out the banquet for the seniors to enjoy. Since a senior banquet is a big event to plan, the juniors split themselves to create groups that focus on different areas of the event. With students working in different groups of the project, they are able to plan out the senior banquet with their best efforts. Clarine Tantowi, a former junior student from the class of 2023, said that their class “put it all together by splitting into groups, like a design group and a finance group,” so that they can “efficiently reach our goals and be able to put together an event that the class of 2022 could enjoy.” The next step after splitting into groups is finding the theme. David Park (‘24), a junior currently planning for the senior banquet, said “So the seniors were interested in celebrating their accomplishment as seniors, and I thought the Hollywood theme would match that. Hollywood is about stars and celebrating their successes.” It was challenging to fit everyone’s preference, so the juniors went for a more neutral approach. Clarine noted that “we (the class of 2023) match the theme with the interest of the seniors by sending a google form of options we have thought of. The one that they chose, head in the clouds, matches with their slogan "22' rising."
However, there are many struggles that the juniors face after planning the overall design of the banquet. A current junior, Reinner Lokanata (‘24’), is part of the entertainment team. Despite being in the entertainment group, he remarked that “the hardest challenge for the BAIS senior banquet is the budget.” Organizing an event with the desire for good entertainment, location, and decoration with a budget is a challenge for almost all of the juniors that had to plan for the banquet. Another challenge that supervisors, like Ms. Hall, experienced was location. “The challenges were always finding the location. There's so many things that make people happy. They want the nicest facility, they don’t want to pay a big price for it,” said Ms. Hall. Clarine also noted last year that “there are some problems along the way. We had a very difficult time trying to find a venue that fits our budget and still looks nice. We reached out to the parents and other people, and we were able to finally land the venue.”
The senior banquet is not only about a fun night where seniors and their families candress up, but also a time to commemorate all of their accomplishments as they leave for the world outside. So, the juniors that are planning for the senior banquet keep Ms. Hall’s words of wisdom in their minds: “It’s not about you. It's about honoring the seniors, it's about learning to be organized in a new way. It's about problem solving of things you didn’t know could be a problem. It’s just about life in general.”