By Melissa Ly (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: April 2, 2014
As a former high school club president, I understand it’s impossible to make everything perfect. You can’t please everyone. You can try your best, but some people only look at the negatives, see the things that still need work, or comment on mistakes rather than recognize your contributions.
However, I do have constructive criticism for the SUS alongside the student organizations at UFV. As a new student trying to find a club to join at UFV, I feel there is a disconnect in the access students have with the actual student organizations.
I have run into a few dead ends trying to locate what student organizations exist at UFV. To start, there is no list available on the UFV website. After emailing around, I found out SUS has a separate website containing a list of all the UFV organizations. Well, I had no idea SUS has a website. Perhaps it is my freshman naïveté and if that is so, I take full responsibility for my ignorance, but I am probably not alone in the matter.
Moreover, when I finally scanned the list of club options, I found it meagre in comparison to SFU and UBC, which are overflowing with clubs for just about anything and everything.
I am open to discovering new interests, but when I looked at the list of 28 clubs, there were only a few that I had any remote interest in. I know there can only be as many clubs as there are students willing to take initiative to run them, but I suggest improving what we do have to work with.
It would be helpful if there were at least one-sentence descriptions of the clubs on the website as there were a handful of clubs which I had no idea what they were about. Does anybody know what the Hanna Club is, or what it really entails to be part of the Human vs. Zombies Club? A small description is easy enough. Each year organizations have to submit a registration package and it wouldn’t be difficult to include a short description about their organization in this application.
The last dead end in my search was when I tried to email the few clubs that piqued my interest. I never received a response back.
I am not anti-UFV. I disagree when people say UFV is a crappy university just because it isn’t a “big name” institution. But I do feel that UFV is lacking in its clubs and organizations department. In all actuality, UFV may have great clubs, but since I cannot access them efficiently, how will I ever know how great they are? UFV needs to show that it is not an underdog, and one way to do this is by bridging the communication gap between the students and clubs.
Hey — maybe I’ll make my own club and call it “Community” (after the awesome sitcom Community), or I’ll join SUS and implement these changes myself. But for right now, it’s too hard for someone new to find a club to join.
