Welcome to Clubs Days, where the AMS trades a concourse full of people vying for your money for one packed with clubs and resource groups. Ostensibly, the point is to let students know about the variety of options available to them as far as affiliations go, but somehow, the event turns into some horrible cross between an election and a carnival.

The compressed time frame and trade-show atmosphere lend themselves to glassy-eyed club members repeating sales pitches with equal fervor to the fifth, the fiftieth and the five hundredth student to be attracted to a table by a display. The slots themselves are assigned by lottery, and since one club sold their prime spot to another a few years back, the Student Administrative Commission (SAC) has been wary keeping clubs in their assigned spots, be they packed on the concourse, jostled in the Ballroom, or idled in a second-floor room that doesn’t see nearly as much traffic as the other areas.

The clubs themselves are weirdly reflective of the fragmented collective student identity on campus; the reason we don’t have twenty thousand people at football games is the same reason there are three hundred clubs. It takes ten signatures, a form, and SAC approval to start a club, and that’s left us with clubs for every affiliation from field of study (Chemistry, International Relations, Classics) to cultural and cross-cultural grounds (CVC, Dragon Seed) to appreciation groups that are mostly protests (the lost and lamented Brian Sullivan Appreciation Society along with the troubled Radical Beer Faction).

Presented with the ability to hang out with other people who share specific facets of your identity and the desire to embrace them—West Coast narcissism anyone?—who would opt to sit on cold bleachers in a damp stadium and watch under-funded but well-padded athletes run into each other at high-speed in the pursuit of getting a ball across a line? This isn’t intended as any sort of slight toward the football team, who are talented and driven and merit our attention and appreciation, but an unfortunate observation (and, as a sidenote, the reason NCAA Division 1 won’t ever happen in this town).

Digressions aside, the fact remains: we take Tuum Est pretty seriously around here. Further to this, we’re a campus full of academic do-gooders, many of whom take an hour to get to school everyday, and don’t have time to coast around for a year or two trying out different clubs. Hence, the very act of club choosing must be done efficiently and the people who are out to recruit you are very aware of this (or they should be, anyway).

Armed with the knowledge that every person at every table wants your email address (but more importantly, your time), the only way to proceed is with caution and purpose. There’s a list of clubs with descriptions inside the AMS Insider (aka. those eye-searingly orange agendas that were thrust upon you by well-meaning AMS volunteers in the first weeks of school) that lets you screen the clubs before you set eyes on them. Once you’ve found them, though, you’re on your own.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...