Members of the Brooklyn College Korean Culture Club exchanged anecdotes on their own superstition and reflecting on the peculiar habits that others students shared.
“This is really a more social type of club,” Shume Akhter, President of KCC, a senior and a Business Marketing major said, emphasizing KCC’s aim to get highlight Korean culture to curious students while fostering its own community of like-minded students allured by its contemporary culture.
Members of the club’s e-board said the discussion’s topic of superstitions and folklore was intended to serve as a brief icebreaker between the roughly two dozen club members in attendance.
“Don’t pick up something you find on the ground,” one student shared, “because if you do, we were told a bad spirit would follow you.”
Organizers also used the occasion’s discussion to segue to a video produced by some of the club’s members to highlight and contrast some of the fascinating distinctions between common American superstitions and common Korean superstitions.
The video featured two friends that are BC students visiting Korea, who share common superstitions from their respective nations, with each friend struggling to take seriously superstitions from the other.
The comedic video, which roused the room full of KCC members with jovial laughter, was a well-edited and highly exaggerated mockumentary on the topic, with student actors demonstrating the varying consequences of stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, or breaching any given superstition from either nation.
For students the video and discussion on the topic opened themselves up to feel less reserved from discussing some of the unique aspects of their lives, with many students of varying cultural and ethnic backgrounds sharing and humored by their own individual irrational habits.
“I didn’t know anything [about Korean culture],” Mathew Reed, a sophomore majoring in Business Marketing and a member of the KCC E-board. “Joining the club helped me gain a better understanding of the Korean culture as a whole.”