WHAT IS ECAASU? The East Coast Asian American Student Union conference is the premiere Asian American collegiate conference in the United States. Founded in 1977, this annual conference brings together influential student leaders from major universities.

Today, ECAASU is at the forefront of the Asian-American movement. Its reach has spread far beyond the east coast, encouraging educational dialogue and networking amongst students from all over the country. With valuable workshops, notable speakers, and recognized performers, the conference attracts the brightest and most involved of student leaders. ECAASU is rapidly gaining more recognition every year as more schools attend and more students participate.

This year, from February 27th to March 1st, Rutgers University - New Brunswick/Piscataway is proud to continue this growing tradition. With over 8,000 students from ten diverse Asian cultures, as well as 50 Asian organizations on campus, Rutgers University is a prime location for a unique, innovative, and memorable conference.


DISTINCT WORLDS, ONE VISION. Asian culture is strong. It is deeply rooted. It has not waivered for hundreds of thousands of years. There are a multitude of them, each with their own distinguishing characteristics that we should be proud of and embrace. Yes, even though it is our strength, it is also our weakness. We are so focused upon our distinct worlds that we fail to recognize that even within all of these distinguishing characteristics, there is one thing that we have in common.

We all strive for peace, for preservation of our culture, for the respect for our ancestors, and we all do so through similar means. Here in America, whether you went to Chinese Sunday School or Indian Sunday School, we all spent our mornings reading from religious texts. As we grow older and enter the real world, we all face the same diamond ceilings, but we also all hold the same perspective on how to break them.

We all share the same vision. A vision that leads to success in a myriad of fields, through parallel methods, and a success that we all desire just as strongly. Perhaps we are all rooted in different areas, perhaps our identity is firmly drawn, but where we all want to go and how we all want to achieve it is something that we share. We may be from distinct worlds, but we do have one vision, and embracing that once vision is the only way that we can achieve what we want to.

GREEN INITIATIVE! As a new initiative to this year’s ECAASU, the conference board will be striving to make ECAASU a green conference. As a green conference, we will reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, cut down paper usage to save trees, avoid unnecessary waste, and avoid using non-recyclable products. Throughout the entire conference, almost every aspect has been carefully evaluated looking for any points that can be improved for the betterment of our environment. ECAASU and Rutgers University recognizes that the world around us is becoming increasingly fragile, and we are doing our part to preserve our planet as much as possible.