BSU hosts annual banquet to finish off the year
Seniors Glorious Njoroge, Ivanna Mensah-Agyekum, Angel Hendrix, Pierre Mbala and Salem Addisu face the banquet crowd with their certificates and stoles.
The Black Student Union (BSU) wrapped up the year by hosting their annual banquet to which a lot of planning and teamwork goes into. With planning starting a couple months back, the underclassmen in BSU worked hard hard to make sure the seniors feel recognized.
“The BSU banquet is an opportunity for us to kind of wrap up our year in a way that is celebratory, but also one in which we show gratitude for all those that supported us over the year. [The banquet is] of an opportunity to look back, but also something to look forward to and send our seniors off in a way [that] they feel encouraged, supported and loved. Not only [that], but also for the students who are also still here it can be encouraging. It is just a time to celebrate,” Lamb said.
This year’s speaker was Jeremy Aldridge, who has been involved with BSU since the very beginning.
“He is just a really cool active person in our community and he has been a long time BSU supporter. He’s been in the background, kind of cheering us on, and we just really appreciate him and wanted to give him the opportunity to speak and to impart some wisdom, motivation and maybe some inspiration to the seniors,” Lamb said.
For BSU, the end of the year banquet has become a tradition where members who have already graduated and members of their first year can come together and celebrate another successful year as well as recognize their members.
“I think it’s important to recognize our students. I think a couple years ago, when BSU first started and really I was only in my second year as a counselor, I was noticing that towards the end of the year there were a lot of awards and a lot of recognition happening through different clubs and organizations where people [were] being recognized for their grades or scholarships that they’d won, things like that,” Lamb said. “I was also finding that a lot of kids in BSU were not being recognized at these events. They were not being recognized on any kind of scale, so I [wanted] to give them an opportunity to feel like there’s a piece of the school that belongs to them, for them to know that they belong. In the end, we just wanted to send them off in a way that was supportive and encouraging, and I wanted them to feel that they had been recognized.”
