Mosquito Pond, Old Ghosts, and Hall Points: The Pressures of Office and Culture of Succession in HKUST’s Hall Student Associations

Beneath Hall 4 lies a lotus pond that residents privately call “Mosquito Pond” (蚊池) — stagnant water breeds mosquitoes, and what ought to be a loathed facility has instead become the hostel’s most recognisable cultural symbol. According to campus culture records, when a new executive committee of Vista (the Hall 4 Students’ Association) takes office, the tradition is for the entire team to jump collectively into Mosquito Pond; residents celebrating a birthday may also be hoisted up by their floor-mates and thrown in, forming a semi-coerced, semi-ritualised mode of collective memory-making. Such details may read as anecdotal, yet they capture with precision a core characteristic of HKUST’s hall self-governance ecosystem: fervour and pressure are always intertwined. Drawing on official SHRL policy documents and campus culture records, this article maps out an ecosystem of hall student associations that depends on voluntary student participation yet is simultaneously pulled in the opposite direction by the “Hall Points” system, with credibility ratings annotated throughout.

HKUST does not operate a collegiate system — a point already elaborated at length in the essay “A Study of Hall Culture.” Without college communities to carry the weight of belonging, the halls of residence (particularly Halls I to V, the oldest) are compelled to shoulder community functions that would otherwise fall to colleges. This institutional backdrop means that the election of officers for HKUST’s hall student associations is, to some degree, amplified in importance: at universities with collegiate systems, such as CUHK or HKU, students draw their sense of community identity from multiple sources (college, academic department, interest clubs), and the hall is merely one among many. At HKUST, however — particularly for residents of Halls I to V — the hall students’ association is often the most immediate, most tangible self-governing body on campus. Its election outcomes and the conduct of its officers directly shape residents’ day-to-day lived experience. It is against this institutional backdrop that this article focuses on several facets of the hall election ecosystem that are most easily overlooked yet most vividly reveal the complexities of “student self-governance.”

# Five Hall Student Associations, an Uneven Map of Self-Governance

UG Halls I to V each have their own House Students’ Association (HSA)^※: House One (Hall I), VERTEX (Hall II), Glacier (Hall III), Vista (Hall IV), and Endeavour (Hall V). These five HSAs are affiliated with HKUSTSU and hold formal seats in the Students’ Union Council — which means that hall association officers are not merely “hostel social club convenors” but also members within the SU Council structure, their seats carrying implications for the SU’s internal seat allocation and power dynamics.

In contrast, the governance bodies for UG Halls VI to IX (Connection Team “Unify,” Leadership Team, Organizing Team) are smaller, less institutionalised, and have no formal link to the SU structure^※. This disparity is itself fertile ground for “mess”: the older hostel cluster (Halls I–V) has accumulated decades of cultural capital and formal representational rights, while the newer cluster (Halls VI–IX) is relatively marginalised. The two do not enjoy equal voice within the student self-governance system — students who are all hall residents nonetheless experience profoundly different depths of self-governance participation depending solely on the year their hall was built.

Take VERTEX (House II SA)^※, for example. Founded in February 1993, its constitutional objectives include “developing each hall’s distinctive hall culture, promoting cultural and social interests, and fostering a sense of belonging among members”^※. The house maintains six competitive sports teams (basketball, football, volleyball, badminton, table tennis, women’s basketball), runs independent floor committees named “Fierce Man,” “Phoenix,” and “American Pie,” and has published an annual yearbook and newspaper continuously since 1995. This density of governance is quite rare among comparable non-collegiate university hostels, and it also means that the actual workload of a VERTEX executive committee far exceeds the popular image of “organising a few gatherings.”

This governance density also means that the remit of a VERTEX executive committee is broad: it must coordinate training and league schedules for six competitive teams, sustain the operation of publications like the yearbook and newspaper that demand ongoing commitment, and attend to the day-to-day running of floor committees and the snack kiosk “Dim Siu 2.” Compared with the generic imagination of a hostel social club that “runs a few orientation events and holds a dinner gathering,” a long-established hall association like VERTEX is closer in substance to a small student enterprise with multiple lines of business. This also explains why the recruitment and election of hall association officers is far from a simple matter of “finding a few enthusiastic classmates”: candidates need the practical ability to coordinate multiple workstreams, which in itself raises the threshold for standing, and also partly accounts for why a tangible incentive like “Hall Points” becomes an important supplementary mechanism for sustaining electoral participation.

# “Hall Points”: The Pragmatic Lever Behind Candidacy

HKUST allocates hostel places using a Hall Point points-based system. Under Section II, points are awarded for leadership positions held in recognised student organisations, including hall student associations^※. In other words, serving as a hall association officer is directly tied to the practical benefit of “whether you can continue living in the hall next year.”

This system design objectively creates a layer of structural tension: in theory, hall association elections are a display of student self-governance and enthusiasm for community service, but in reality, a substantial portion of the motivation to stand comes from the pragmatic calculation of “farming points to secure a hostel place.” Both motives often coexist within the same candidate and are difficult to distinguish from the outside. Among students who actively run for hall association office, exactly what proportion are driven by genuine commitment to hall culture, and what proportion have made a strategic choice after calculating that “without standing, I might not get a hostel place in the draw next year” — the publicly available materials provide no quantitative answer. This article, following the logic of the institutional design, faithfully notes this tension, without speculating on or characterising individual motives.

It is worth noting that this practical pressure also indirectly influences the “degree of competitiveness” in hall association elections. When standing for election is significantly motivated by securing a hostel place rather than pure voluntarism, elections more readily take on the appearance of “scraping together enough people to fill the quota” rather than “multiple candidates competing on a contest of ideas.” This shares an institutional logic with the persistent phenomenon of “one team, one seat” in recent SU annual elections (see One Team, One Seat: The Era of “Uncontested Elections” in the HKUSTSU^※): when the practical drivers for participation outweigh pure enthusiasm, uncontested elections more easily become the norm rather than the exception.

# “Jumping into Mosquito Pond”: Hall 4’s Ritualised Orientation Tradition

According to an HK01 article introducing HKUST campus culture, the lotus pond beneath Hall 4 earned the name “Mosquito Pond” because stagnant water breeds mosquitoes, and Hall 4 residents jump into Mosquito Pond when they take up office (上莊), while residents celebrating a birthday may also be hoisted up by floor-mates and thrown in — this has become a campus custom^※.

This type of “water immersion ritual” is not uncommon in Hong Kong tertiary hostel culture — using a collective act that carries a degree of discomfort, even a rough edge, to mark the moment of identity transition: “you are now officially one of us.” By its nature, “jumping into Mosquito Pond” is closer to a voluntary, playful community ritual rather than an externally imposed punitive practice. However, the extended practice of “being thrown into the pond on your birthday” — if it involves non-consensual public teasing — raises questions about the boundary between such acts and the excesses sometimes seen in orientation camps, a line worth watching. This article faithfully records the existence of this custom based on currently available materials. Credibility: Single source (this detail currently appears only in a single HK01 campus culture feature; no further cross-verification from hall association official channels or independent media has been found). There is, at present, no indication of specific complaints alleging that this custom involves coercion or has caused actual harm.

# “Old Ghosts”: The Return of Graduates and the Paradox of Succession

In Hong Kong’s tertiary student society (莊) culture, “Old Ghosts” (老鬼) refers to senior alumni who have stepped down from student organisation leadership or even graduated, yet still periodically “return to haunt” (回魂) the activities of their old society. According to general observations of this cultural phenomenon across Hong Kong academia (not HKUST-specific reporting), the Old Ghost culture is supposed to serve the positive function of transmitting experience — helping a new cohort of office-bearers avoid pitfalls. On the flip side, however, some “Old Ghosts,” after stepping down or graduating, continue to intervene frequently in the decision-making of the current office-bearers, even subjecting them to near-brutal interrogation and assessment in marathon questioning sessions known as “Con meetings” (諏會), under the banner of “passing on experience.”

The controversy stirred by this phenomenon is widespread and cross-institutional: Con meetings routinely consume over ten hours of the new office-bearers’ time as they face successive rounds of grilling from seniors, something some students view as a disguised ritual of “asserting dominance” rather than pure knowledge transfer. There is also a view that it is precisely this harsh entry threshold and the pressure of succession that have exacerbated the trend in recent years of student organisations across multiple Hong Kong universities “breaking the莊” (斷莊) — having no one willing to take up office. As far as accessible records go, no dedicated reporting has been found that specifically identifies negative cases of Con meeting culture within HKUST’s hall associations or Students’ Union. Following the principle of “no fabricating events without confirmed evidence,” this article records this phenomenon only at the pan-Hong Kong tertiary level as background context, and does not forcibly graft it onto the HKUST case.

That said, cross-referencing this pan-Hong Kong tertiary phenomenon with HKUST’s own public records still yields some indirect corroboration. As noted in the essay “Crisis of Society Fees and Membership,” five out of the ten officers in the current SU Executive Committee are “veteran officers running for office again.” This ratio itself suggests that a succession model of purely “fresh faces taking over independently” faces similar difficulties at HKUST, requiring reliance on seasoned members repeatedly “returning to the pot” (回鍋) to keep the organisation running. If the “return to the pot” of veteran officers is analogised to the intervention of “Old Ghosts” at the hall association level, the driving logic behind both is quite similar: when the new generation of students shies away from taking up office — whether because of harsh Con meeting traditions or simply due to academic and life pressures — the sustained involvement of senior members becomes a pragmatic choice for maintaining organisational continuity, even if this choice objectively delays the process of a complete generational transition.

# “Wisdom Stone” and Other Campus Self-Governance Anecdotes

Several anecdotes related to self-governance and academic pressure circulate within HKUST campus culture. According to the HK01 report, there is a stone bench near Bridge Link known as the “Wisdom Stone” (智慧石), accompanied by a campus legend: “Stand on Wisdom Stone, and it’s either Dean’s List or Quit U” (企上智慧石，一係 Dean's List，一係 Quit U). Such exaggerated campus lore is essentially a form of gallows-humour catharsis by students in the face of academic pressure; there is no empirical support, nor can it be verified. Credibility: Apocryphal.

According to the same report, HKUST also has a “SPY” system, whereby selected students play “undercover” roles during orientation activities, tasked with breaking the ice among strangers — a mechanism that aligns with the organisational logic of hall association and departmental society orientation camps. This further illustrates that HKUST’s orientation and hall culture rely heavily on “soft mechanisms” spontaneously designed by students, rather than formal processes uniformly regulated by the university administration.

# The “Identity Gap” Between Old and New Hostel Clusters: A Structural Inequality

Juxtaposing Halls I–V (with formal HSAs and council seats) against Halls VI–IX (with smaller governance bodies and no formal link to the SU structure), one can observe a striking “institutional generational gap.” This is not merely a surface-level difference of “the old halls have a bit more cultural depth.” It touches upon a substantive issue of representational rights allocation: residents of Halls I–V, through their HSAs, hold formal seats in the SU Council (the評議會), meaning their interests and demands can enter the SU’s decision-making purview through established channels. Residents of Halls VI–IX, because their governance bodies are not linked to the SU structure, occupy, to some degree, an “invisible” status within the formal representative system of campus governance.

The cause of this gap is largely historical. Halls I–V are the hostels that existed when HKUST was founded (1991), and through over thirty years of cultural accumulation and institutionalisation have developed the mature self-governance system seen today, complete with formal council seats, yearbook publications, and multiple competitive teams. Halls VI–IX were built in subsequent expansion phases, and their student communities have not undergone institutional sedimentation of comparable length. Whatever the cause, the real-world consequence of this gap is this: students who are equally HKUST hall residents enjoy structurally different levels of voice within the student self-governance system, solely because of the construction batch of the hall they live in — a piece of “mess” worth documenting in itself, even if it stems not from any specific individual’s malicious decision but is a product naturally formed by historical processes. As far as accessible records go, no dedicated review or reform proposal addressing this representational inequality between old and new hostels has been published by either the SU or the university administration.

# Weighing the Evidence: Is This System “Healthy”?

Publicly available materials present multiple perspectives on the evaluation of the hall association succession and election ecosystem; this article makes no determination:

• Positive perspective: The hall student associations and their traditional activities (sports teams, yearbook publishing, cross-floor committees) constitute HKUST’s primary field of student self-governance practice in the absence of a collegiate system. The organisational capacity and cultural capital accumulated by the five HSAs over decades form a core part of many students’ campus memories.
• Structural-critique perspective: The Hall Points system binds the motive for standing to practical benefits, objectively diluting the electoral essence of “purely voluntary participation.” The Old Ghost culture and Con meeting traditions are also regarded by some students and commentators as negative factors hindering the succession of new blood.
• Administrative perspective: As far as accessible records go, official SHRL documents only positively introduce the organisational functions and activity arrangements of the HSAs. No official response or commentary has been found addressing the impact of the Hall Points system on the electoral ecosystem or the controversies surrounding Old Ghost culture.

This article faithfully records the operational logic and latent tensions of this ecosystem based on currently available materials, presenting multiple perspectives side by side; the rights and wrongs are left to the reader’s judgement.