By Ellie Ta, 2025 CLA Intern
“Build the tallest tower possible that’s strong enough to hold a marshmallow, using only spaghetti, string, and tape.”
Nancy’s first team-building exercise is one I knew too well. It’s haunted me at summer camps, icebreakers, and youth conferences. I’ve done it enough times to remember the gist: don’t waste tape, keep the base wide, and whatever you do, do not get greedy with height too quickly.
Naturally, within the first two minutes, our team taped our pair of scissors shut. I usually take pride in being efficient, and I enjoy winning (very much). But in the moment I was disoriented, about as stable as our tilted spaghetti tower. Was my shaky taping helping at all? Should I have spoken up about the base being flimsy?
I wasn’t new to this game, and that was the problem. The very fact that I’d done this activity before made me worse at it: I was confined to the way twelve-year-old me built these towers, unable to see what this new scissor-taped, spaghetti-wobbling version actually needed.
This same false confidence carried me the rest of orientation; the week kept handing me things I had seen before, encouraging me to go on autopilot:
Oh, I’ve read about redistricting before!
LA City Hall, I’ve been to Cerritos’s, how dif erent can it be?
Championed vs. lived values? I’ve had discussion about this in my Race, Power, and Justice class!
By the time I walked into my host office, I was full of quiet confidence. After all, Congressman Tran’s district includes my hometown, Cerritos. I know the local schools, the zip codes, the area codes flashing when constituents call. When asked to list small businesses in the district, I could pull from memory: the Korean place from dinner last week, the pizza shop my elementary school ordered from, the banh mi place we got lunch from the first day.
It was exciting—grounding even—to help people that I could run into at the Cerritos Towne Center on a random Friday. But all I knew about the district was mostly just my own routine. It was personal, yes, but extremely insular. Working in the office forced me to step outside of that—to see the neighborhood not just as a backdrop to my life, but as a place full of people with different needs and different stories than mine. Hearing directly from fellow constituents about their struggles with federal agencies or the Congressman’s policy stances showed me the community’s true resilience and diversity, nuances that don’t show up in the library newsletter or park renovation announcements.
A spaghetti tower, though silly, reminded me how easily confidence can curdle into competency. Mistaking familiarity for understanding is a quiet trap, yet it was one I fell into this week. You think you know the rules, but then help tape the team’s scissors shut. This week has taught me to pay closer attention to when ‘knowing’ something becomes a stand-in for actually engaging with the present version of it. I’m looking forward to the next eight weeks—more time with cohort-mates turned friends, fewer assumptions about what feels familiar, and building on a new foundation of self-awareness stronger than dry spaghetti.
The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of CAUSE or the CAUSE network.
The CAUSE Leadership Academy (CLA) for students is a nine-week, paid, internship program that prepares college undergraduates to lead and advocate for the Asian Pacific Islander community on their campuses and beyond.