On September 22nd, the Student Government’s Clubs Committee held a meeting for those interested in creating new clubs at NYU Shanghai. The New Club Development Program (NCD Program), which seeks to enable people to create student-run organizations specifically at NYU’s Shanghai campus, held the event to walk individuals through the process of creating new clubs. Though one may think that after the initial application is sent in for approval that the NCD Program is over, students were informed at the meeting that this is not quite the case. Approval is only the first step in a year long process for students starting new clubs. While the initial application is fairly simple and really only asks for a mission statement and a vague idea about what sort of events the club will put on, the real work comes in after the approval and denial letters go out on October 10th. In order for clubs to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of the university, a number of further steps have to be taken or these nascent clubs can be put on probation or dropped from the club program altogether. Such steps include creating a constitution, forming a budget, and electing officers, as well as ensuring that the club keeps up a membership of at least 10 individuals and doesn’t exclude anyone, especially based off of their nationality. The only point of contention that students seemed to have with the way that the new club creation process worked actually seemed to stem from this final requirement and the way that it was asked to be fulfilled during the initial application process. In order for an application to be considered for approval, the four founding members of an organization need to come from at least three separate countries with no more than two founding members being of the same nationality. While this did spark some confusion among individuals present at the meeting, leaders of the NCD Program ensured that this policy was for the best and stated that it was put in place in order to help foster more cross cultural interaction and to guarantee to the student body as a whole that all individuals will be accepted into any club they wish to join, regardless of where they come from. Richard Zhao, Chair of the Student Government’s Clubs Committee, stated that this is in fact one of the main things that is looked at when clubs submit their application, the clubs committee as a whole “[wants] the new clubs to be as inclusive as possible to all students from different cultures and backgrounds.” The meeting itself also facilitated students interacting with each other, however, rather than placing an emphasis on diversity as the application had done, extra time at the end of the meeting was set aside as a way for people to discuss the possible clubs they had thought up and combine forces with each other if they held similar ideas for new organizations. Though some times it did work out this way and separate groups of students merged their organizations together, it also often resulted in one group of individuals simply seeing the idea all the way through where other people that had originally been interested backed off in favor of simply joining the club as members, as was the case with the Biking and Swimming Clubs. Of the twelve different categories that clubs at NYUSH can fall into, Sports Clubs and the differentiation between these and sports teams drew a lot of discussion during the meeting, because the NCD Program staff felt that it was important for students to understand the extra restrictions that these particular clubs would have going into the program. For starters, where sports teams are allowed to practice with coaches a few times a week, sports clubs are only allowed to practice with their coaches a few times a month as they need to technically be registered with the university as outside speakers. Sports clubs are also only allowed to play against other university’s sports clubs, not teams; for example, NYUSH’s badminton club could not play against ECNU’s official badminton team, but they could play against their badminton club. While these rules and regulations may have deterred some people from creating clubs, the way that the NCD Program was set up this year also seemed to encourage the creation of less generic organizations. While a lot of essential clubs that most schools have were created last year (i.e: UBA, Model UN), this year allowed for a lot more creativity. Take for example Quarkey, a new club that according to Co-Founder Nicholas Sanchez aims to “explore the many ways in which science can influence art and in which art can influence science.” Unique clubs such as this one are becoming easier to come by at NYU Shanghai for a number of reasons, including the fact that in judging whether a new club should receive approval, uniqueness is one of the five key factors that the NCD team looks at. Along with uniqueness and openness, Richard Zhao stated that the clubs committee takes the possible required budget of clubs, the likelihood of sustainability, and the meeting of basic outlined requirements into consideration when clubs are pending approval. Last year, once a club became official it was filed into one of nine separate categories: Arts, Performance, Media; Sports Clubs; Cultural; Identity-Based; Issue-Based; Literary/Publication; Professional; Service/Volunteer; and Speech and Debate. However, at the September 22nd meeting, the NCD Program announced that three new categories are being added to the list: Academic, Computer and Technology, and Recreational/Social. Compared to the 540 clubs that the Washington Square campus currently enjoys, NYU Shanghai’s present total of 25 clubs seems fairly tiny, though completely understandable because of the age of the campus and relatively small population size. But even the change in number of different club categories seems to indicate an interest on the part of the NCD Program to expand the number of clubs offered at the Shanghai campus. This article was written by Kadallah Burrowes. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Kadallah Burrowes