Stop hating on Clubs Week

By Riley Hill, September 18 2014 —

Forget what your boring stupid grumpy “friends” think. Clubs Week is great. So throw this newspaper to the ground, march down to MacHall and find yourself a new hobby.

Unless you frequently hang out in the courtyards of MacHall, you might not have known about clubs week because it’s poorly advertised.

Clubs Week is the undergrad club exhibition held at the start of the fall and winter semesters. This is why the MacHall courtyards are filled with tri-folds explaining the benefits of swing dance and finding Jesus. This is when clubs recruit most of their new members. It’s also your best chance to find something exciting on campus before the tedium of the semester sets in.

Everyone I talk to has a complaint about campus clubs. They attract a lot of weirdos. Or they rarely accomplish anything. They’re too enthusiastic. Or they’re too bureaucratic. Sure, this is all true. But as a student at the end of my university years, I’ve learned that clubs have a lot to offer.

If you’re an arts student like myself, clubs offer one of the few lifelines we have out of the service industry. Let’s face it, we were duped. We pay $6,000 a year to read books available at the public library. We thought we were too clever for trade school and now the best our good grades will get us is a shot at education or law school. We study some interesting ideas. But when it comes to finding a job, arts degrees are worth little on their own.

It’s not hard to move up the ranks in a campus club. Executive titles are easy to get and they look great on a resume. I was the “vice-president finance” of a club in my first year of university despite being 19 years old and possessing no knowledge of finance.

The job took two hours every week and I was given the chance to manage volunteers for the first time. And as my friends who have graduated discovered, time spent in clubs pays off in the job market.

If you’re in another faculty, there are academic clubs that will help you land a job or get into graduate or professional school. The time commitment is usually small, so it’s a simple way to separate yourself from the herd.

Clubs also offer the chance to pursue an interest or goal with like-minded individuals. Don’t underestimate how difficult this will be when you have a full-time job. You’re not going to find a group of anime fans when you work at Suncor. University is full of strange people who share your strange interests. Clubs Week is the best time to discover them.

Last but not least, clubs give you the chance to try something new, something university is all about. Right now, MacHall is full of students who can teach you to row, play quidditch and shoot guns for about five bucks.

So take advantage of these opportunities while you can. If you don’t like it, you’re not stuck in a club forever. You have your whole adult life to do the same old. Take a chance with something new.