"Before I die I want to…"   How would you reply?  Numerous students received the chance to finish this open-ended statement last week by writing their responses on posters stationed around the UW-La Crosse campus, set up by the Soc Club.

The Soc Club is a group that meets twice a month to discuss sociologically related topics (such as social issues within society and this campus), set up volunteering expeditions within the La Crosse community, and learn more about the possible administrations of their majors in order to aid in preparing for their futures.  The club also plans projects at UW-L that affect people campus-wide.

For this particular activity, inspiration came from a completely random source.  "What prompted us to take on this project was that I found Candy Chang's website through stumbleupon.com during the summer and thought it would be cool to replicate it and see how UW-L's students' answers differed from those in New Orleans," said student and Soc Club member Kat Klima.

Candy Chang, a co-founder of the Civic Center Company, is an artist whose aim is to create a sense of comfort through design in large urban areas, where there is typically little feeling of community.  Her most infamous project, the "Before I Die…" endeavor, proved to be a major success, receiving attention from multiple blogs and other websites, as well as the people in her New Orleans neighborhood.  She executed the project by turning the side of an abandoned, rustic home near her street into a public "chalkboard" where anyone could write down one thing they wish to achieve before death.  This ultimately brought her community closer together by allowing people to discover they had the same desires and also helped these individuals to learn more about their neighbors' goals and dreams.  It is said that the driving force behind this "chalkboard" was Chang's own experience of losing a close loved one.

As for here at UW-L, a same heightened sense of community was the expected outcome for the students and staff from the Soc Club.  "This project pertains to UW-L students because it reminds us there is a lot of commonality between us. I feel like a lot of times, we tend to focus on the differences between us rather than the similarities that unite us as a student body. The reason I say this is because a lot of the answers on the boards were similar," said Klima.

The most common replies written on the posters included wishes such as to "fall in love," "go skydiving" and "travel." Others were more on a personal level, like "end homophobia" and "single handedly legalize marijuana."  All responses, no matter how conventional, forced the writer to reveal at least a small segment of his or her inner thoughts, which held a certain level of difficulty for some.

"One thing that I noticed when I asked students to write something on our board was that it took them a while to think of something. Because our lives are so hectic right now, and are only going to continue to get busier, it's my hope that UW-L students were prompted into remembering what was truly important to them through the ‘Before I die I want too...' project," said Klima.

Through sharing our hopes and goals, and taking a cue from Chang, we can achieve the sense of unity that is constantly strived for by groups around the world.