Like every Fall semester, Elliot Tower saw new clubs sprout, while others bloom with renewed spirits and longstanding campus organizations take root in the annual Grizzfest celebration. With hundreds of attendees, around 50 clubs welcomed students to Oakland University’s social life.
Among the dozens of themed posters representing new clubs on Sept. 9 was the Botany Club, founded last year under the direction of Emmaline Allen, an environmental sciences student.
“There are a lot of environmental science clubs, there was a pollinator club, but there wasn’t a plant-related club,” Allen said. “So we wanted more help with the pollinator gardens and there were a lot of people who were interested in plants in general who wanted to join.”
Through collaborations with the Pollinator Conservation Organization, the Ecology Club and the Native American Student Organization, Allen and her team have consolidated a community of nature enthusiasts at OU.
“Running a club, I like to engage with the community,” Allen said. “It’s really cool to plan something and have people actually attend it and see that people are actually interested in this topic.”
Community building has gone beyond university grounds, thanks to student organizations like the Red Glasses Movement — a group dedicated to volunteering at local nonprofits.
“We started the club in honor of a young girl named Audrey Lou,” Miri Abro, Red Glasses Movement OU chapter president, said. “She had Down syndrome, but she died of a heart defect when she was eight.”
Founded last fall, the OU chapter plans one or two events per semester to volunteer around the Metro Detroit area to follow Lou’s message “to live bold, love big and pass it along,” Abro explained.
“We do a lot of volunteering, a lot of fundraising, a lot of social events, just to get the community together and get everyone to spread kindness, spread love,” Abro said. “Sometimes you just have to take yourself out of your own world and go experience someone else’s world as well.”
Clubs were also reinvigorated by a wave of enthusiasm over the summer, Maggie Marchiani, the Cosplay club treasurer, explained. In her handcrafted Hatsune Miku cosplay, she explored the opportunities between hobbies and learning offered by student organizations.
“This year, we’re really kind of hoping to up our events, so we’re looking to do some classes,” Marchiani said. “I know we’re gonna have one on wig making, maybe one on how to do 3D printing.”
As an artist, Marchiani explained, cosplay competitions helped her overcome her stage fright while refining her craftsmanship, something she hopes to share with the students joining the club.
“Cosplay for me is a lot about jumping hurdles, I think, and I want it to be like that for our club mates too,” Marchiani explained.
Attendees also shared their excitement for the 2025 edition of Grizzfest, highlighting the revival of clubs that went dormant over time or due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I like that we’ve actually got a pretty good emergence of kind of like ethnic group clubs,” Brandon Craddock, a mechanical engineering student, said. “We used to have a lot of those, then they all kind of went away after COVID… I think that’s kind of nice, the root and community establishment that I thought made this school kind of cool back in the day.”
From niche clubs to academic honors societies, students could find a multitude of student-run organizations to explore hobbies, develop skills, network or bond with the campus community.
“It’s important because there are a lot of kids who are coming from high school, 18, 19 years old, and they might not know a lot of people at Oakland,” Joey Papas, a mechanical engineering student, said. “So to be able to communicate and network with people through an event like this is really good for making friends and kind of making those connections at school that you’re going to have for the next four years.”
