Within all organizations, change is inevitable. Significant members leave as significant members join. This is especially true with the Indian Students Association.

When Ankit Chopra and other ISA leaders graduated after the 2016 school year, a new leadership class took over the organization and Rahul Borker and Pranav Ramesh became co-presidents.

Dante Holloway, the Coordinator for Clubs and Organizations, touched on the significance of successful transitions of leadership within organizations when he said, “Whether or not they have a really good or effective officer transition will really lead to a strong start.”

This transition is very important to the success of any organization. However, this is not the end of it. The leaders must then decide how to make their events even better than the last year’s events.

“Generally what happens is we will host an event and we’ll do a post analysis that is actually required of us,” said Borker. “We will also, during our following meeting, we will have everyone sit down and say a couple of good things and a couple of bad things.”

These discussions are essential to ISA’s progress. After identifying ways to improve the planning process and the events themselves, they can begin to plan these events.

“A lot of people don’t know that the reservations and the costs and budgeting is very time consuming in terms of a timeline analysis,” said Borker. “You have to do things very well ahead of time.”

Planning these events can be very stressful, but also make for some of the best memories of club members, according to Chopra.

“The best and worst part was planning events,” Chopra said. “It was fun planning events and coming up with ideas to try and do something different than the previous years, but that was also the hardest part because it was hard to find a balance between school and wanting to make the club really good.”

ISA hosts two events every year. Diwali, which happened on Nov. 13th, is the festival of lights, where there are about five performances and a dinner. India Night is their main event and is hosted at The LaSells Stewart Center, which seats about 1,000 people.

“It’s similar in format, it’s just way longer,” said Borkar.

Planning these two events takes up nearly their entire year. If these two events can be hosted with enough preparation and success, then the club usually takes on Holi, the festival of colors, which happens in May.