Unity across Faculties

Image retrieved from Ares Faculty Instagram page (@aresfaculty)

4 FAC 1 HWACH: that’s a common refrain in Hwa Chong, reflecting the cohesive spirit of Hwachongians across the 4 Faculties (Apollo, Athena, Ares, and Artemis). This year, we have seen this spirit manifested in the burgeoning cross-faculty collaborations in the form of cross-faculty brunches, where Hwachongians enjoy their schoolmates' electrifying live performances while enjoying tasty brunch at the comfort of their classrooms. Today, HC Herald spoke to the Faculty Heads of Ares, Ignatius Low (21A11) and Leow Yi Xuan (21S76), to learn more about the Ares-Artemis Faculty Brunch, ArteMystAres!

PubSoc: What do you think is the value of cross-faculty collaborations?

Ignatius & Yi Xuan: We think having cross faculty collaborations is extremely beneficial especially in building relations between the two faculties. Given the nature of faculty committees (FacComms), we don’t usually work with people from other FacComms, and so collaborations are a great platform for people to get to know each other, as well as learn new things from each other! Being able to push out a united product also gives much satisfaction to both parties and forge some great memories!

Interviewer: What made you decide to take part in the cross-faculty collaboration?

Ignatius & Yi Xuan: Actually, it started off as an idea by our FacComm to reach out and suggest collaborations between faculties. We wanted to go along with this idea, because we had seen our seniors do collaborations in the Passing Down Reports (PDRs) they have passed down, and thought that it would be a great idea to continue it in our year! In the end, during a meeting with the other fac heads, we collectively decided that for fac brunch that all of us would collaborate, and thus ArteMystAres and Sour by Apollo and Athena happened!

Interviewer: What do you think are the best moments from the cross-faculty collaboration?

Ignatius & Yi Xuan: We think the best moments are definitely the new friendships made as well as the opportunity to ideate and bounce off ideas from other people who have fresh perspectives! As a FacComm, we agreed that this was quite an eye-opening experience to work with people outside of Ares and learn new things!

Interviewer: What are some of the difficulties in carrying out the collab (e.g. logistics, communications etc)?

Ignatius & Yi Xuan: For our collaboration with Artemis, it generally went quite smoothly without much logistical difficulties. However, due to Covid-19 restrictions then, we had to cut out performance time. There was some difficulty in deciding on the performances we would be showing in our respective faculty brunches. In the end, we decided to prioritise the performances by our own faculties first!

Interviewer: Could you give a sneak peek of future collaboration with other faculties?

Ignatius & Yi Xuan: Well, I don’t want to spoil the fun, but I will leave you all with this - there will definitely be exciting collabs with the other faculties, and you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out! :)

Written by: Hu Chen Wei (21A15)

Edited by: Tran Vu Phuong Uyen (21A15)