Club culture frustrates students

Having trouble getting into a club? You aren’t alone.

Many students are expressing their struggles with a club culture that appears to be both overly selective and exclusionary to new applicants. Junior theater major Mia Juni shared her frustration with what she feels is too harsh of an application process.

JUNI: I think a lot of times clubs will reject like a large amount of people or especially underclassmen, because they consider it like a tough love thing where it’s like everyone is initiated like this and we’re only in this position because we were also rejected. But I don’t know if that necessarily encourages people to come back and it might like dishearten them instead, because I know that’s happened to a couple of people.

Part of the appeal of joining a club at college is meeting new people. However, with clubs seeming increasingly restrictive, opportunities for meeting other students seem more elusive than ever. Freshman Mac Werthman shared her thoughts on how different the club landscape feels at USC.

WERTHMAN: In high school it was like, you know, you could just sign up and then show up and people were just happy to see you there. Whereas like now it’s like you have to apply or you have to pay or you have to audition or you know, you have to know someone in order to get in.

For some clubs, connections seem to be key, making who you know feel more important than what you can do. Freshman theater major Keira Osborne shared her frustration with a culture she perceives as rooted in nepotism and her experience being rejected from a dance club, despite being a dancer of 15 years.

OSBORNE: I figured, like, if you are a trained dancer, like, you wouldn’t have a problem getting onto them. And then obviously, like, that wasn’t the case because I went to an audition for like a contemporary dance team and I auditioned. I walked in the room and everybody had on a T-shirt that said, like, what sorority they were in? And I’m not in one.

While the process may be difficult, Osborne offered her thoughts on how it can be improved to welcome more students.

OSBORNE: Maybe the people who run the clubs, like, should have somebody like that’s facilitating to make sure that you don’t like put your friends in it. Like, I know for, like the ISP’s for theater, like we have like an idea coordinator who makes sure that like the cast is diverse and things like that. So I think and to make sure that the directors not just like putting their friends in it, like maybe a position like that might help.

With over 1,000 student organizations at USC, not even the long application processes can stop students from finding a community they connect with.

For Annenberg Media, I’m Maya Gomes.