Boston University’s Global China Connection, an organization committed to helping Chinese students with professional networking in the United States, spent Saturday afternoon attempting to build the world’s largest LEGO word.
Millie Zhu, GCC marketing director and junior in the College of Communications, described it as “a fun event for the club members to get to know each other, and for other Chinese students in BU.”
As for the LEGO world they built, current president, Teresa Wei, said they chose the theme “terriers,’” because they “want to inspire BU school spirit.”
Zhu added that GCC events are typically more focused on professional activities, such as providing career opportunities for Chinese students to work in the U.S., but every now and then they “like to mix it up.”
Former GCC president and a junior in Questrom School of Business, Bo Peng, described the event as marking a new chapter for the club.
“Our club is mainly for academic purposes, like for panels and for summits,” Peng said. “But now it’s sort of transformed into a new kind of era of having fun. It’s more social and academic together.”
Members were excited to see that the club was challenging them to break a world record.
DaPaul Xu, a member of GCC and Questrom freshman, said the novelty of it made him want to participate.
“It’s hard to see like student organization or a student club saying that they’re going to change the world record,” Xu said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I never saw that before I’m going to try it.’ ”
The new focus on social activities emerged during Wei’s time as president, but she does not take credit for the LEGO idea to challenge the world record.
“It was actually one of the member’s ideas because he was really into breaking the Guinness records,” she said. “We want to hear everyone’s voice … we want BU GCC to be a platform that can realize everyone’s dreams.”
Organizer of the event and junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, Wenqi Luo, said he got the idea while stuck in isolation during the pandemic. It was during this time he started building LEGOs and breaking records.
Luo started with building a LEGO tower for his high school, leading to the creation of a model of the entire building for its 50th anniversary.
“I came into the idea that if I built a really large model, why not go for the Guinness world record?” Luo said.
Previously, Luo has broken three LEGO Guinness world records. He currently still holds two of them, one for the largest LEGO brick number and another for the largest interlocking plastic brick sentence.
A total of 63 people signed up for the event, a favorable number considering GCC planned for 40, but the bond that comes with taking a team challenge head-on drew a crowd, and there’s even talk about inviting other GCC chapters from other universities to build a “larg[er] model,” according to Luo.
But for now, the “terriers” LEGO piece will have to do.
“[I] hope the model we built yesterday could bring us to the fourth record,” he wrote in an email.
