All those who have tried to start a club recently have undoubtedly noticed that the process for initiation has drastically changed. There is no longer an online application, and, instead, club founders must reach out and schedule an interview with members of the Committee on Student Activities (COSA). This process is much more hands on, and COSA hopes that it will discourage students who are not serious about starting and running their club.
COSA is made up of a group of students charged by the Director of Student Activities, Mr. Jim Yanelli, and advised by the Assistant Director of Student Activities, Ms. Alex Long, “to improve the quality of club life on campus.” The unwavering goal of COSA is to enhance the club experience on campus. However, the process to create that club life experience has changed drastically.
Recently, more and more clubs have been failing to stay active throughout the year. Mr. Yanelli said, “It is always sad to hear from a third-former, who went to club fair and signed up for a club he or she was really enthusiastic about, but then proceeded not to hear from them ever again.” That is the main thing that the new changes are trying to prevent.
There are currently more than 100 clubs on campus, which is a huge amount considering that Choate has less than 900 students. COSA’s original methodology to deal with this large number of clubs was to attempt to find the clubs that were inactive and ineffective and shut them down. However, with the proposed change of the club proposal process, the members of COSA are hoping to tackle the problems of having inactive clubs by producing a more streamlined selection process. The aim is for COSA to serve as a resource to the prospective club and help guide them through the early stages.
The new process has quite a few major changes. First of all, it limits the terms where club proposals are open. Now, freshmen can only propose clubs during winter term, while sophomores and juniors can propose clubs during either the fall or winter term. Seniors, now, are not allowed to propose clubs at all because it is too hard for them to start a club, develop a base of members, and then organize the passing of the baton before they leave Choate. Overall, the idea behind these changes is for all clubs to be created and approved by the start of spring term so that they can begin hosting meetings.
Secondly, the process itself has gone through a major shakedown. A prospective club now needs a faculty adviser from its inception so that he or she will have a full understanding of the club’s goals and requirements. Previously, clubs could be started for up to a term without a faculty adviser and would often end up not following the club’s constitution.
After finding an adviser, the prospective club leaders along with the faculty adviser will meet with members of COSA, and with Ms. Long or Mr. Yanelli to cover the basics of the club. This conversation will include discussing the club’s goals, resources, costs, meeting frequency, and uniqueness. The next step in the process is for the club to host an informational meeting, where they introduce their club to the public and explain what it is all about, which a COSA representative will attend. Following this meeting, the leaders will create a constitution for the club to follow that will be ratified and signed by its members in the second meeting. After this second meeting, the COSA representative will present a review of the first two meetings of the prospective club to the rest of the committee, which will then make the final decision on approving the club.
Ms. Long, the main adviser to the committee provided a great statement summarizing the change. She said, “The idea was to make the process more transparent. We get a lot of club proposals per year and the idea is to get kids to think about their clubs in a way that works.” She continued, “A lot of [the previous process] was paper driven and it was very intimidating for two leaders to sit in a group with 12 COSA members sitting there and judging them. The idea now is for COSA to be more of a support and a resource, and the new club proposal process reflects that by allowing students to try their club out with COSA helping support and monitor them. It’s very hard to start a club, and students are very busy with their schedules, so the idea is to let them try the club to see if it works or not.”
