echo Written by: Joan and Lavanya
Edited by: Supriya Sivabalan
Pictures are credited to their respective owners.
Rock The Goals – Malaysia’s Biggest United Nations Concert was held on the 25th of September 2019 in JC Hall, Sunway University. The concert was held to raise awareness towards the achievement of the 17 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in conjunction with the celebration of the 4th anniversary of the 17 SDGs. Due to the haze that clouded Sunway, the venue of the event this year changes from the usual football field to indoor JC hall, but that did not reduce the excitement for our Sunway students. This yearly event has always been one of the biggest events for Sunway so this year was definitely no exception!
The chief executive officer of the Sunway Education Group, Dr Elizabeth Lee expressed that she hopes the event would further inspire the Sunway community to come together and achieve the SGDs for sustainability. Dr Elizabeth Lee also explained that these yearly UN events are important to create awareness especially for the Sunway students as they will be the ones who are going to inherit the world so she urges the students to do better in order to make the world a better place.
On the day of the event, the doors opened at 6pm and it was immediately filled with a huge crowd3. To start off the event, SDG videos and short messages of support for the event were played on the giant screens. Then, the emcee opened the event to warm up the crowd and all 17 SDG flags were presented while the national anthem was playing in the background. After that, a welcome address was given by the UN Resident Coordinator in Malaysia, Stefan Priesner. He explained that the SDGs are all about a well-balanced development between economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection. He further emphasized that SDGs cannot be achieved with only the effort from the government, he believed that the private sector and society need to work their part to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Developments.
Priesner’s welcome address was followed with a performance by the Sunway 24 Festive Drums Team. As a result of the outstanding performance, the crowd was hyped up. According to one of the students, Lee Shun Ying, it was one of her favorite performance of the night and she was glad to see Sunway provides their very own students a platform to showcase their talents.
Then, the crowd was also entertained by Malaysian All-Autistic Band, Zimi J. After that, there was ROCKestra performance by Malaysian Philiharmonic Youth Orchestra featuring Deja Voodoo Spells which is also one of the crowd’s favourites of the night. There were performances by rock star Muzza and a guest appearance by Arjuna who both performed their own original songs. Muzza and Arjuna also returned to rock the stage during the finale with the iconic Queen’s song, We Will Rock You, which is the perfect song to end the event as it acted as a reminder to the crowd that together, we can achieve greater things in the world such as SDGs.
Overall, everyone truly deems this event a huge success! However, there was some realistic feedback from students as well regarding this event. A student from ACCA, Dzul Iskandar said that “The F&B weren’t particularly good”, which was agreed by a lot of the students because a lot of them did not get a chance to grab some light snacks before or during the event starts. They hope that that the event next year can come up with more variety of foods that are vegetarian-friendly and can cater to more people and tastebuds. Upon these suggestions, the students only look forward to more of these events in the upcoming yeas – waiting to enjoy themselves even more.
With the night ending on a positive note, it was great to see everyone in the Sunway community come together as one to celebrate this meaningful achievement. Other than that, it was great to see that this event provided local artists and students from Sunway a great medium to showcase their talents.
From this picture you can see that Sunway is truly the #MostHappeningCampus, till next year!
