Welcome Week continued at Oakland University on Sept. 10 with GrizzFest, one of the largest events of the year revitalizing the campus community.
Half an hour before noon, Elliott Tower was surrounded by hundreds of students exploring around 50 campus groups tabling at the annual student organization and local business fair.
New clubs like Grizz Balls, founded last year, shared tables with long-standing organizations like The Fencing Club, which has been present at OU for more than 13 years.
“We gained about 60 students last year and we’re hoping to at least double our numbers this year,” Simon Roeser, Grizz Balls secretary, said. “It’s kind of cool seeing these people that we don’t see anymore and reconnecting. It also gives us a chance to connect with a bunch of new people that just like playing pool.”
Like Roeser, a new wave of student leaders populated the tables with novel initiatives to refresh established clubs or breakthrough with new student organizations. Jose Barrios, mechanical and electrical integration lead at the Electric Racing Association (ERA), was another one of such new leaders.
“I’ve never run this [tabling] before,” Barrios said. “Usually I go and get the flyers but it’s my first time actually giving out the flyers, so it’s a learning curve — how to approach [students] is a new and nice thing to learn.”
While posters and flyers were still a common practice, more interactive advertising techniques were employed. ERA brought their electrical racing car to the event, while other organizations had dancing showcases, traditional food or sports gear to try.
“If you’re a new organization, the best thing to do is to just push as much as you can with advertising,” Gracy Hershey, president of Echo Cognito, said. “It doesn’t matter how old your organization is, if you’re not out there doing flyers, social media, trying to weasel your way into the classroom, you’re not going to have anyone showing up.”
Hershey runs the Honors College literary magazine and like many other students, she designed new ways of advertising her organization. Hershey gave out gift bags with pens and notepads to encourage submissions for this year’s issue of Echo Cognito, An Anthology of the Human Heart.
Across from the river of students scanning QR codes and collecting flyers, Louie Lewis, the Pre-Pharmacy Society president, echoed the importance of networking and advertising for campus organizations.
“The challenge right now is trying to find e-board members, people who want to get involved,” Lewis said. “This is my first semester being president, and I’m trying to rebuild the club and get it back to where it was, so events like this help a lot.”
Like Lewis, Ramiz Ghareeba, vice president of the Middle Easterns In Engineering Society, was also navigating campus leadership for the first time.
“We just started [at the] end of last semester,” Ghareeba said. “We wanted to get out of our comfort zone. The main goal for our club is just to make new friends, make connections, and learn as you go because that’s the main goal when you’re in college.”
Roeser attested to the importance of getting involved on campus as a freshman and later as a leader.
“When I first came to Oakland my first year, I didn’t really have too many friends to hang out with,” Roeser said. “Through these organizations, I met these people down in The Den and we started this club, and it just got us a lot more friends and I think that’s really cool.”
For more information on campus involvement, visit the Office of Student Involvement website.
