Two times is too few

Once per term, ClubsFest takes over campus and represents a near perfect way to filter thousands of students into as many diverse organizations and email lists as possible. With over 300 clubs in five categories, McMaster has an incredibly large breadth of opportunities for students to get involved with.

However, the scheduling of the two ClubsFests still causes complications for students. If you happen to fall sick and need to stay home, tough luck. What if you have a lot of classes on Wednesday? See you next term.

Whatever reason you have, the ability to put names and faces to clubs could pass you by with few alternatives available. Even if you didn’t know what you wanted to be a part of, the ability to browse what’s available and see what interests you could eventually lead to big changes in your university experience. Your best opportunity for finding clubs in the next four months was five hours in the middle of the week.

These wouldn’t be issues if the clubs directory and Clubza did a good job of allowing students to browse clubs, but the system remains inefficient.  Some don’t have sufficient or specific enough tags to search, so finding one that fits your interests might be difficult. Even the subtle change from “gaming” to “games,” for example, leads to eight different clubs with only one appearing on both, and fails to include any poorly tagged clubs that might fit in these categories.

There is insufficient contact detail on each page, often with only an email and no website or social media for clubs that have them. While the MSU Clubs Operating Policy states that clubs must respond to any correspondence with the Clubs Administrator within six days, this rule doesn’t apply for any students attempting to contact them.

A select few in the clubs directory aren’t even a part of the five broad categories the system uses to group general interests together. If ClubsFest can organize all of its participants into an eight-colour legend based on location, then why can’t they do it for their online service?

The best courses of action would be to either fix up Clubza, a good online presence for such a large amount of clubs should be a priority in any case, or extend the presence of ClubsFest.

An extra day, either tacked onto the first or later on in the term, would help alleviate issues that student have with the currently restrictive schedule. Even “Mini-ClubsFests” could highlight a specific few every once in a while.

It would allow the extensive number of clubs increased opportunity to appeal to students and give clubs that want additional members the attention they deserve. As an added benefit, the additional hours would help cut down the density of students if the pressure of “now or never” is alleviated.

While there are financials involved, the final proposed Budget for 2016-17 having an expense of $6,000 compared to a $5,400 revenue, the ClubsFest events have also made money for the MSU in the past. The original Proposed Budget for 2015-16 shows a net gain of $2,571.64 in the 2012-13 year end and $1,025.63 in the 2013-14 year end.

The only real issue is the time spent setting up and cleaning with clubs taking on the work of manning the tables. The extra time spent on more ClubsFest hours and improving Clubza will have a positive influence on a significant portion of the McMaster experience. No one should feel like they’re being left out for a term by missing five hours.