Most clubs featured in Clubs Days last month have, yet again, fallen victim to primitive bribery as a means of acquiring new members for the end of the year. It’s understandable — being one of 20 dance clubs on campus can make it hard to stand out among the competition. That said, a hand-painted pen with your club’s logo on it and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos® is not enough to get me to join your electro-funk Korean Braille-reading club. I need something unique and useful to persuade me that your $20 membership is worth buying if I’m only planning on attending the first meeting.
If you want me to join your club I’m going to need a signed guarantee that my newfound skills will have any practical use. It’s undeniably impressive to be able to bust out an angelic falsetto or master the fancy footwork of traditional salsa, but all this is wasted if it is never seen. Breaking out in song in IKB or dancing among the traffic of Main Mall has continually failed to garner the High School Musical-eque reactions I was anticipating. Either your club needs to reestablish the cultural norms around spontaneous musical performances or teach me a less invasive way of conveying my newfound talents.
Should you find yourself as a recruiter for a language group, I am going to need, at minimum, the proper legal documentation that would allow me to enter and exit the country of the language’s origin. The reason for this basic request goes back to this same idea of practicality and usability. As an active member of my high school’s Spanish club, I found barging into Taco Bell and ordering in Spanish to be neither an effective means of reinforcing my new language skills nor conveying my order to a Canadian-raised, Anglophone cashier. It is through this experience that I have deemed a passport to Mexico, or at the very least Puerto Rico, as the only proper means to practicing what I learned in the club.
And last, but certainly not least, are intramural sports leagues. You may be expecting me to make some outlandish request for a personal trainer or guaranteed play time but all of that is wholly miscalculated. Nothing needs be changed about the recruitment tactics of these clubs. I am a sucker for praise and the promise of being UBC’s next big dodgeball celebrity is always enough to get my name and email on a sheet of paper.
Share this article
