How to Find a Student Club

One of the first events I attended at my university during the welcome week back at the end of August was a school-wide function to showcase all of the different organizations offered here. There, I visited the student union and the recreational center to explore a few of the many student clubs the university has to offer. The trip did not exactly go as planned.

My first impression of the event was chaos, and it did not really change as the night progressed. Fortunately, I went with a friend, her suitemates, and my suitemate, so the outing did provide some benefits in the fact that I made some new acquaintances and socialized with some people that I still spend time with today. However, I’m not sure how much I actually learned about the clubs.

There are a lot of organizations at the school, and they swamped us completely. We headed to the student union first, because when we passed by the recreational center there was a huge line to get in the doors. As we headed down the street, we were stopped three times by enthusiastic recruiters trying to get us to join a sorority. None of us were particularly interested in doing so, but we smiled and thanked them for the information. When we finally made it to the union, we headed upstairs to the second floor.

Here, the big rooms were stuffed to the brim with tables promoting various groups. The first room we went into was largely sororities and fraternities. Something I did learn from this event is that a lot of sororities promote community service and do work in the community, which was something I had not really known before. To be honest, the only thing I knew about sororities came from movies, where they were not cast in a particularly pleasant light. Still, we weren’t very interested in joining one, so we passed to the next room after circling all the tables through the crowd and dodging the girl that was trying to hand out free birth control to everyone that came within two feet.

This room, like the other, was so loud that we couldn’t hear each other talking, and it was also crammed with people. We went around the room, and we lost track of half the group somewhere in the middle. This room was largely religious groups and churches. I paused by a couple of the tables to pick up a pamphlet before getting shuffled out by the crowd. Bravely, we peeked down the hall and were blasted with extremely loud music being played by a DJ that had set up camp in the center of the hallway. We decided that maybe going back to the recreational center would be more productive.

With fewer girls than we started with, our little group went back to the gym. The line was gone now, so we went inside to look for more clubs. My friend wanted to look for a club that would teach her to tango; for some reason she had her mind set on learning to dance, so we started looking for somewhere that had the tables set up for the more recreational clubs.

The gym was more crowded than the student union, if that was possible. It was hot and loud, and there were still more religious groups and sororities that tried to shove their information at us. One good thing I found there was a pamphlet someone handed to me about campus health services, useful information that I might actually need to know. After about half an hour of trying to see what kind of tables there were set up in a basketball gym, but unable to move very well due to the crowd, we gave up and escaped back outside, deciding that the best way to find a fun club that we were interested in would be to use the search engine on the university’s website that is specifically for student clubs.

All in all, I think the event was a nice idea, but it was a lot of information to process at once. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to really consider a specific group, and it was impossible to find whichever one you were actually looking for. Still, it reinforced that fact that the college offers practically whatever you’re looking for, and I met people who are now my friends. Next year, however, I think I’ll pass.