Medical students dance their way to success
A trio of medical students who are due to pick up their degrees today say one of their best achievements from their time at Queen’s was making their mark with K-pop.
Jasmine Lau, Nikola Fök and Alex Wee are big fans of the global dance phenomenon and set up the University’s first ever K-pop society in 2019.
Jasmine says: “I was inspired to start this society because, although at that time, K-pop was pretty niche, I knew there was a small community of K-pop lovers in Northern Ireland. I was aware of other K-pop pop societies in other universities across the UK and I thought why doesn't that exist here? So, I decided I was going to be the one to do it here first!”
Jasmine has a background in dance, excelling at HipHop and Ballet and initially came across K-pop online. She was keen to go to classes in Belfast and, when she couldn’t find any, she decided to set up one herself as a university society.
She set up the society in 2019, with her friend Nikola and were joined soon after by Alex. They ran weekly K-pop dance classes and put on performances at socials, winning best new society at the SU awards 2019.
When Covid hit, the moved to online dance tutorials and hosted social events so that they could continue to interact during lockdown. In 2022, they competed against other universities K-pop societies in an intervarsity K-pop dance competition in Kings College London and also won Society of the Year at the SU Awards, which recognised how well they had adjusted the society during Covid.
The society is open to both student and non-student members which Jasmine says has resulted in greater diversity: “The society has always been popular with international students particularly those from Asia where K-pop is more well known. It's a real melting pot of people from diverse backgrounds and lots of unlikely friendships have been forged.”
Whilst Alex and Nikola are heading off to work in England as junior doctors, Jasmine plans to start her career off here and will continue to be an active member of the society.
She says: “The experience of building a society from scratch and being a pioneer in the local K-pop community in Belfast has been the highlight of my university experience. The society has always been my passion project and I feel privileged to have seen it grow from classes with six students to having over 200 members before we left the committee.
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