Mosquito Ponds, Old Ghosts and Hall Points: The Pressure and Succession Culture of Joining Hall Associations at HKUST

At the foot of Hall 4 there is a lotus pond that students privately call the "mosquito pond" (蚊池) – stagnant water breeds mosquitoes, and what should be a nuisance has become the most recognisable cultural symbol of the residence hall. According to campus culture records, when the new executive committee of Vista (the Hall 4 House Students' Association) takes office, the custom is for them to jump into the pond together; residents celebrating their birthdays may also be picked up by their floormates and tossed in – a semi-coercive, semi-ritualised way of producing collective memory. Details like these read as mere anecdotes, yet they capture precisely a core feature of HKUST's residential self-governance ecosystem: enthusiasm and pressure have always been tangled together. Drawing on official SHRL policy documents and campus culture records, this article maps the ecosystem of hall student associations – systems that depend on voluntary student participation yet are pulled in the opposite direction by the "Hall Point" mechanism – and marks the credibility of each claim.

HKUST does not operate a college system, a point explained in detail in the article "A Study of Hall Culture" (〈舍堂文化考〉). With no college communities to carry a sense of belonging, the halls (especially the oldest, Hall I to V) are forced to take on the community functions that a college would otherwise shoulder. This institutional backdrop means that elections for hall association officers at HKUST carry, in a sense, outsized importance: at universities with college systems, such as CUHK and HKU, students' sources of community identity are plural (colleges, academic departments, interest societies), and the hall is just one among several; at HKUST, especially for residents of Hall I–V, the house students' association is often the most immediate and concrete self-governing body on campus, and its election results and the style of its officers directly shape residents' day-to-day experience. It is against this institutional backdrop that this article focuses on several facets of the hall association election ecosystem that are most easily overlooked, yet reveal the most about the complexity of "student self-governance".

# Five house associations, one uneven landscape of self-governance

Each of UG Hall I to V has its own House Students' Association (HSA)^※: House One (Hall I), VERTEX (Hall II), Glacier (Hall III), Vista (Hall IV) and Endeavour (Hall V). These five house associations are affiliated with HKUSTSU and hold formal seats in the Union's Representative Council – which means hall association officers are not merely "residence hall social convenors" but also members of the Union's representative structure, and their seats feed into the internal seat allocations and the balance of voice within the Union.

By contrast, the governing bodies of UG Hall VI to IX (the Connection Team "Unify", the Leadership Team, and the Organizing Team) are smaller, less institutionalised, and have no formal link to the Union structure^※. The disparity itself is fertile ground for "unfinished business": the older halls (I–V) have accumulated decades of cultural capital and formal representation, while the newer halls (VI–IX) are relatively marginalised, and the two groups do not enjoy equal voice in the student self-governance system – fellow residents, simply by living in buildings of different vintages, end up with very different depths of participatory self-governance.

Take VERTEX (House II SA)^※ as an example. Founded in February 1993, its constitution describes its aims as "developing the unique hall culture of each house, promoting cultural and social interests, and consolidating members' sense of belonging"^※. The house maintains six competitive teams (basketball, football, volleyball, badminton, table tennis and women's basketball), plus independent floor committees known as "Fierce Man", "Phoenix" and "American Pie", and has published an annual and a newspaper continuously since 1995 – a density of governance rare among comparable non-collegiate university residences, and one that means the actual workload of the VERTEX executive committee goes far beyond "organising a few parties".

That density also means the VERTEX executive's remit is strikingly broad: it must coordinate the training and league schedules of six competitive teams, keep running publications like the annual and the newspaper that demand sustained input, and manage the floor committees as well as the day-to-day operations of the snack shop "Dim Siu 2". Against the conventional picture of a residence hall society that "organises a few orientation events and puts on a dinner or two", a long-established house association like VERTEX is in substance closer to a small student enterprise with multiple lines of business – which also explains why recruiting and electing hall association officers is far from a matter of "finding a few keen classmates". Candidates need the practical ability to coordinate multiple workstreams at once, and that itself raises the bar for standing; it also partly explains why a real-world incentive like the Hall Point system has become an important supplementary mechanism for propping up participation in house association elections.

# "Hall Points": the real-world lever behind running for office

HKUST room allocation uses a "Hall Point" credit system; under Section II, points are awarded for leadership positions held in recognised student organisations, including house associations^※. In other words, serving as a house association officer is directly tied to the practical question of "whether I can keep my hall place next year".

This design objectively creates a structural tension: house association elections are, on paper, an expression of student self-governance and commitment to the community, but in practice a considerable share of the motivation for running comes from the utilitarian calculation of "earning points to keep my bed". Both motives typically coexist in the same batch of candidates and cannot be distinguished from the outside – of the students who actively campaign for house association office, how many are genuinely devoted to hall culture and how many have calculated that "if I don't run, I may not draw a hall place next year" is a question the public record cannot quantify. This article notes the tension faithfully, based on how the system is designed, and makes no speculation or judgement about individual motives.

Worth noting is that this real-world pressure also indirectly shapes how competitive house association elections are – when running for office is largely about keeping a hall place rather than purely voluntary, elections are more likely to look like "scraping together enough candidates to get it done" than "multiple slates contesting on ideas". This shares a structural logic with the recent phenomenon in Union annual elections of a persistent "one slate only" (一人一閣), as discussed in One Slate Only: The "Uncontested Election" Era of HKUSTSU Elections^※: when the real-world push to run outweighs sheer enthusiasm, uncontested elections become the norm rather than the exception.

# "Jumping into the mosquito pond": Hall 4's ritualised orientation tradition

According to a HK01 feature on HKUST campus culture, the lotus pond below Hall 4 earned its nickname "mosquito pond" because stagnant water breeds mosquitoes, and Hall 4 residents jump into the pond when they join the house association^※; residents thrown in by their floormates on their birthdays have also become a campus custom.

Water-initiation rituals of this kind are hardly unusual across Hong Kong's tertiary residence culture – a collective act with a degree of discomfort, even roughness, marks the transition "you are now officially one of us". In nature, "jumping into the mosquito pond" is closer to a voluntary, playfully collegiate communal rite than an externally imposed punishment; but the extended practice of "being thrown into the pond on your birthday", where it involves non-consensual public mockery, sits at a boundary with hazing-style behaviour in orientation camps that is worth keeping an eye on. This article records the custom faithfully on the basis of available material. Credibility: single source (the detail appears so far only in the one HK01 campus-culture explainer; no corroboration from house association official channels or independent media has been found), and there is no indication so far of the custom involving coercion, nor of any specific complaints of actual harm.

# "Old ghosts": the alumni who haunt the halls, and the paradox of succession

In Hong Kong's student society ("society", 莊) culture, "old ghosts" (老鬼) refers to veterans who have stepped down from student organisation leadership – or even graduated – yet still "come back to haunt" and involve themselves in society affairs. According to general observations of this cultural phenomenon in the Hong Kong tertiary sector (not HKUST-specific reporting), the old ghost culture is supposed to serve a positive function of passing on experience – helping the incoming committee avoid the mistakes of their predecessors. But the other side is that some old ghosts, after stepping down or graduating, continue to intervene frequently in the decisions of the incumbent committee, and even at the marathon grilling sessions known as "Con 会" (Con meetings, 诹会) subject new committee members to near-harsh interrogation and examination in the name of "passing on experience".

The controversy this stirs is general and cross-institutional: Con sessions can eat up a dozen or more hours of a new committee member's time fielding relentless questioning from their seniors, and some students see them less as pure knowledge transfer and more as a veiled ritual of "establishing authority"; others argue that it is precisely this harsh threshold and succession pressure that has aggravated the recent trend of "empty societies" (断庄), where no one is willing to take over, across Hong Kong universities. On the available record, no report specifically identifies a negative case of Con-culture within HKUST hall associations or the Union; following the principle of "no inventing incidents without confirmed specifics", this article records this phenomenon only in the general Hong Kong tertiary context, and does not graft it onto HKUST.

That said, cross-referencing this general phenomenon with HKUST's own public record does turn up indirect corroboration. According to the article Society Funds and the Membership Crisis^※, of the ten officers on the incumbent Union executive committee, five were "veterans returning for another term" – the ratio itself suggests that the model of purely "fresh faces taking over independently" faces difficulties at HKUST too, and that the organisation depends on senior members repeatedly coming back to keep running. If one draws an analogy between veterans' return and the intervention of "old ghosts" at the hall association level, the logic driving both is rather similar: when the new generation of students shies away from taking office (whether because of the harshness of the Con tradition, or simply the pressure of coursework and life), the continued involvement of senior members becomes a pragmatic choice for keeping the organisation alive – even if that choice objectively slows the process of a full handover to a new generation.

# The "Wisdom Stone" and other campus self-governance tall tales

HKUST campus culture also carries a few tall tales tied to self-governance and academic pressure. According to the HK01 report, near the Bridge Link there is a stone bench known as the "Wisdom Stone" (智慧石), about which the campus legend runs: "Stand on the Wisdom Stone, and it's either the Dean's List or quit U" (the local saying goes "企上智慧石，一係 Dean's List，一係 Quit U" – sit on it and you will either make the Dean's List or have to drop out). Exaggerated campus legends of this kind are essentially students' black-humoured way of coping with academic pressure; they have no empirical basis and cannot be verified. Credibility: tall tale.

The same report also mentions that HKUST runs a "SPY" scheme, in which some students are cast as "undercover" figures during orientation, tasked with breaking the ice among unfamiliar freshmen. This mechanism sits squarely in the same organising logic as the hall and departmental orientation camps, further illustrating that HKUST orientation and hall culture rely heavily on "soft mechanisms" designed by students themselves, rather than formal procedures standardised by the University.

# The "identity gap" between old and new halls: an inequality built into the system

Placing Hall I–V (which have formal house associations and seats in the Union) alongside Hall VI–IX (whose governing bodies are smaller and have no formal link to the Union structure) reveals a curious "institutional generational gap". This is not just a surface difference of "the old halls have deeper cultural roots"; it touches on a substantive question of representation: residents of Hall I–V hold formal seats in the Union's Representative Council through their house associations, and their interests can enter the Union's decision-making purview through established channels; residents of Hall VI–IX, whose governing bodies are not linked to the Union structure, are to a degree "invisible" in the formal representative system of campus governance.

The roots of this gap are largely historical – Hall I–V existed at the founding of the University (1991) and, through more than three decades of cultural accumulation and institutionalisation, developed the mature self-governance system they have today, with formal seats, annual publications and multiple competitive teams; Hall VI–IX were built later, and their student communities have not undergone an equivalent period of institutional sedimentation. But whatever the causes, the practical consequence is: two HKUST residents, purely because of which construction batch their building belongs to, occupy structurally different positions of voice in the student self-governance system. That in itself is an "unfinished business" item worth recording – even if it is not the result of any particular individual's malicious decision, but a product of historical process that took its own course. On the available record, neither the Union nor the University has issued any dedicated review or reform proposal on this uneven representation between old and new halls.

# Belonging, juxtaposed: is this system "healthy"?

On the question of how to evaluate the succession and election ecosystem of house associations, the public record offers several angles, and this article makes no ruling:

• The positive view: the house associations and their traditional activities (sports teams, annual publications, cross-floor committees) constitute the main arena of student self-governance practice at a university without a college system; the organisational capacity and cultural capital that the five house associations have built up over decades form a core part of many students' campus memory.
• The structural critique: the Hall Point system ties the motive for running to real-world benefits, objectively diluting the "purely voluntary participation" nature of elections; the old ghost culture and the Con tradition are also seen by some students and commentators as a negative factor obstructing the renewal of the membership.
• The University's angle: on the available record, SHRL official documents introduce the house associations' organisational functions and activities in positive terms only; no official response or commentary has been found on the Hall Point system's effect on the election ecosystem, or on the controversy around old ghost culture.

This article records the operating logic and the potential tensions of this ecosystem faithfully on the basis of available material, laying out the different perspectives side by side and leaving the reader to judge the rights and wrongs.