By Jack Werner
Signal Contributor
Over 175 student organization tables lined the sidewalks from the Brower Student Center to Eickhoff Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 4. Perfect strangers talked, listened to recruitment speeches and, if convinced, exchanged emails for first meetings.
Clubs ran the gamut. Pre-Dental? Check. MMA fighting? Check. Humanitarian Engineering? Check. Even Manhunt had its own table. For those who have any club ideas, starting a club is always an option, making it easy for everyone to get involved on campus.
One of the clubs, Net Impact, is an organization that seeks to “promote corporate social responsibility,” said the club’s president, Erik Moutenot, a junior international business major.
This semester, Net Impact will host TOMS Day Without Shoes, a day when the entire campus can walk to class barefoot. According to Soles4Souls, a global nonprofit organization, over 300 million children worldwide are without shoes. Net Impact hopes this campaign will help spread awareness about this phenomenon and lead to more business-based solutions.
Across the sidewalk from Net Impact, members of the Circus Club were inciting excitement in students with juggling, hula-hooping and their presentation featuring student unicyclists dressed in the traditional circus attire. The College’s Circus Club, formerly the Juggling Club, not only teaches how to juggle, hula-hoop and unicycle, but also invites students to perform with them at select events on and off campus.
“Our number one goal is to have fun and relax,” junior history major Steve Santamaria said. “But also it’s about encouraging Circus Arts — they’re a dying art form. Of course, though, it’s still about entertainment — you’ll never see so many people laugh, smile and cheer for you.” The club travels weekly to the Katzenbach School for the deaf to teach juggling classes in the well-known whimsical fashion of hand-eye coordination and intense focus.
If you missed this year’s Student Activities Fair, do not fret. Most clubs have only had their first meeting so far, so there are still plenty of opportunities to get involved.
Nevertheless, the social experience was truly the point of the Activities Fair. A chance to meet face to face with an organization you are interested in could shape the rest of your college career. As was apparent on Wednesday, students involved in more than one club were able to interact with students from a broader category of interests. So if you want to be involved, go above and beyond.
