Club Awareness Day offers clubs chance to reach out to students

Every semester the Santa Monica College campus fills up with hundreds of students crowding around various club booths lining the quad. On the day of Club Row, various clubs hand out flyers and educate students on their purposes and goals, and it’s usually a very large affair.

This Tuesday, however, the event was shrunk down in order to give many clubs, many being new, the opportunity to advertise themselves before Club Row.

“Club Awareness Day is a smaller version of Club Row, where the clubs can come out in tables and represent themselves so that they can get membership, so that Club Row can be even more awesome,” said Inter-Club Council Vice Chair Courtney King, while she encouraged students to join different clubs whilst blowing up and bending balloons into various shapes.

Some clubs, like the Feminist Leadership Alliance, met more than just people who were interested in potential membership; They had their share of interesting characters visit them as well.

“One guy told me that men make less money in porn, so we should be fighting for men’s rights, instead of women’s," said the club’s president, Raven Hustun. "I think it’s the controversy that attracts people, to be honest with you.”

Another club, Generation of the Future, is actually trying to expand its horizons beyond SMC. “[The USC division] actually just started about a month ago, but [we coordinated a USC hospital visit] with them,” said Marvin Hakimian, a member of the club.

While some clubs are trying to expand, others are entirely new. “I think it’s one of those things where the first time you create a club as it continues to go on you’ll learn how to continue to enhance it,” said Nadiatu Deen, president of the newly-formed World of Glamour Club, a club that wants to join make-up artists, hairstylists, and photographers. “Honestly it hasn’t been difficult, just going with the flow of creating a club for the first time.”

Other new clubs, such as the Adelante Club, have had a previous presence on campus. In Adelante Club’s case, it would be the Latino program on campus for which it’s named. Despite having had a head-start of sorts, it doesn’t make things any easier for them when it comes to creating a club.

“I think for being new, we’re really trying to survive and just get more people to join. We’re looking for board members. We’re actually starting to pick it up, I think we’re gonna do really well,” said the club’s AS liaison Ruben Rubio. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Latino-based club here, we feel that the majority here is Latino nowadays, so I think it’s gonna do really good."

Improv Club’s vice president Mariah Casillas felt that there were very real difficulties in not only creating a club, but running one.

“I think [what’s difficult] is really finding people that are committed,” said Casillas. “Like, it’s tough to go ‘okay, we want you guys to be officers, and you guys need to attend the meetings’. And if they don’t attend the meetings, it’s like, okay, we need to find other people who are passionate about it and who want to be a part of it.”

The entire event went smoothly except for a couple of minor inconveniences, according to King. The Associated Students met with some trouble when none of their representatives showed up on time, to the first-come-first-serve event to set up their table.

“We ran into a little bit of trouble trying to get food trucks here today [as well], but this event is still really fun. It’s all going very well,” said King.