My college clubs, ten years later.

Ten years later, my experience at the University of Florida is still eating shit.

In this miniseries, I’m looking back at different tenets of my college tenure, one decade after graduation. In the first installment, I wrote about the classes and how they impacted my career (spoiler, they didn’t).

This time, I’m delving into the facet of college that inspired me to start this series in the first place — a bizarre series of disappointments so perplexing, I’m not entirely sure they weren’t all part of a huge gaslighting attempt against me. I’m talking, of course, about all of my clubs, activities, and extracurriculars.

I want to begin with the following disclaimer: yes, I am biased against UF. Yes, I’m well aware that I sound like the boy who cried wolf as I levy these complaints. But I need you to understand something: when I say that nearly every club, activity, organization, or other assembly of people at the school did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING — I mean it, from the very essence of my bones. Other than convening in a room and talking about plans that would never happen, these groups did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

(For the naysayers, I will acknowledge that, once in a blue moon, some organizations either hosted or participated in social events. But they were supplementary to the supposed intention; that is, no one deliberately started the clubs just to have an excuse to plan parties or happy hours.)

The biggest association I joined was the Reitz Union Board Entertainment (RUB) Bands Committee, which pitched itself as the club that organized all of the musical acts that would play on campus. Presumably, its members were responsible for discovering or contacting musicians and organizing concerts. We were led to believe that, as members, we would have a direct hand in choosing the acts, and as a reward for our efforts in planning and working the concerts, we’d be able to get front-row seats or even meet the artists.

Needless to say, none of that happened. While RUB was a large organization that did successfully plan some big campus concerts, we members did not have a say in any of it. Club meetings consisted of sitting around a table and pitching musical acts, themes, or other ideas. . . only for the club presidents to shoot down every suggestion and go through with whatever the staff advisor planned instead. None of our suggestions ever made it past this talking stage.

Our only participation with concerts was doing the grunt work — checking tickets, giving wristbands, cleaning up. . . you know, the labor that, in the real world, people would be PAID to do. I don’t consider this a club activity, because everyone involved would’ve rather simply attended the shows as fans without needing to also work an unpaid shift. We were not guaranteed tickets, and we did not meet or greet anyone. Plus, if we didn’t sign up for a minimum number of shifts and attend a certain number of meetings each semester, we would be dismissed from the club altogether. (Yes, crazily, the club was willing to give up unpaid volunteer labor just because participants weren’t voluntarily laboring unpaid enough.)

So, essentially, RUB was a club for those willing to work concerts for free without being able to even enjoy them. What a great value proposition. Meanwhile, the biggest, most popular concerts were orchestrated by a different organization altogether, and their members did receive the perks we all had expected. And that club catered solely to Greek and extroverted students, so for us, it was a non-starter.

(I only stayed in RUB because my friends loved to gossip and complain about everything with me. That’s why I do anything.)

Another fun fact in the RUB club lore: one semester, a friend of mine wasn’t able to make the minimum number of club meetings, and she was dismissed. At the same time, she had single-handedly designed all of the graphics and posters for the club, for free, just because she wanted to help. We complained to the leadership about this injustice, but they didn’t care. Meanwhile, the rest of us contributed nothing to the cause, and stayed.

Another club member attended the very first meeting, but was never seen again. Everybody thought she had simply dropped out until she decided to randomly show up for the end-of-the-year party. She acted like everyone knew and loved her and that she had been around the whole time as she pillaged the food. Because traditional attendance wasn’t taken at the party, our presidents didn’t even notice she was there.

Oh, and the whole foundation of the club was shallow and pretentious: interviews to join were based on nothing beyond how broad and obscure your very-specific college indie rock music taste was. If you liked other music, like that of top 40 radio, you weren’t selected. Your ability to actually organize or be helpful with events was irrelevant.

Ahem, moving on.

As a big softie for the planet, I also wanted to join an ambitious, active, environmental club. The first three or four I contacted were completely inactive or else didn’t answer — par for the course when it came to UF, unfortunately.

But eventually, I found IDEAS, which seemed to be a standard environmental club focusing on recycling, sustainability, climate change, and other typical green topics. It seemed fine. I wasn’t picky.

Of course, this club turned out to be precisely the letdown I expected. With every meeting, we’d sit at classroom desks while the club president reviewed what we talked about last time, followed by planning for what we’d like to do next time. There was occasionally an icebreaker or a speaker or short video presented. Many people in the club hooked up with each other. Nothing was ever actually DONE.

When you think of an environmental club, you may think of planting trees, picking up trash, starting a garden, or protesting something. We never did any of those things even once.

Actually, there was one laughably pointless service activity we tried to implement: a “recycling fairy,” wherein someone would don a fairy costume, find someone on campus recycling something, and reward them with a reusable water bottle.

The idea was talked about for months, and then we finally tried it out. Our president threw a plastic bottle in the middle of a busy walkway as the rest of us hid in nearby bushes. Several students almost tripped on the obstruction before someone finally tossed it in the nearby recycling bin. Our president, wearing a frilly pink tutu and a tiara, ambushed the student and presented her with the reusable water bottle. The student stared at her in utter confusion. Lost on everybody was the irony that our president needed to first partake in littering herself for the recycling moment to happen.

This entire experiment was carried out exactly one (1) time. We never did anything like it again.

Other than that, IDEAS threw a couple of parties and a camping trip. . . but even those were merely products of friends in the club going and planning their own events separately. Fun as they may have been, they were not specifically club events open to any member. And nothing “green” happened there.

My next experience was one I covered extensively on my old blog. Membership in the Delta Epsilon Iota “academic honor society” was a scam in the truest sense of the word. DEI charged a membership fee of $70 to do absolutely nothing. The organization did NOTHING WHATSOEVER. I’m as serious as a heart attack. You’d show up, they’d talk extensively about what the club “could” do for community service for an hour, and then NOTHING WOULD EVER HAPPEN. The club’s leaders would name-check many events that sounded respectable, but they were just activities other organizations were planning that the leaders wanted to piggyback on or attend as guests. The club’s advisors and other adult leadership repeatedly stressed the “excellence,” “determination,” and “ambition” of its members in empty speeches. Then we were dismissed until the next meeting where it’d all be repeated again.

Famously, DEI was also the club that “participated” in UF’s Dance Marathon, an all-night event to raise money for cancer research. The leaders bragged about how great it turned out. But as I wrote about in my old blog, I actually attended the event (in an attempt to win an iPad) while NONE OF THE LEADERS DID. THE CLUB DID NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE EVENT IN ANY CAPACITY.

Over my tenure, there were a few other clubs I only had a passing involvement in. Ad Society, the networking group for advertising majors, was nothing but a forum for students to kiss the ass of every single speaker brought in, desperate for jobs.

Then there was the student theater program, which was run competently enough. . . but only staged the most pretentious, self-indulgent work, where every story contained “dark and depressing” subject matter like alcoholic fathers, pill-addicted mothers, and people having mental breakdowns, threatening everyone onstage with guns.

I actually did participate in a couple of their shows, and they were completely and utterly forgettable. The audience was scant, the cast didn’t speak to each other much, and no bonds were formed. When the shows ended, I never heard from any of them again.

In fact, these clubs made very few lasting bonds or memories at all. I’m not saying I didn’t have fun or make friends at the time, but most of it was utterly anonymous and forgettable. I struggle to recall any specific days spent with these people, which is an anomaly in my otherwise uncanny memory.

As I reflect, how does any of this impact me now? With college classes, I acknowledge that I did learn something, even if the lessons were entirely unrelated to my career. With the clubs, there’s really no debate — these efforts were utterly useless, period. Young adulthood is already full of shitty jobs and pointless, unproductive hangouts. I didn’t need more of that when I was genuinely trying to participate in something.

As an adult, I’ve joined volunteer organizations and they’ve all been quite the opposite of the college club experience: they have a mission and people meet intentionally, for the stated purpose. Everyone is so busy and selective with their time that naturally, they only invest in activities that deliver as they promise. If anything, I’ve wanted more of the casual hanging out and doing nothing that college provided, and my friends don’t. College clubs and activities were pointless, added nothing to my days, contributed nothing, prepared me for nothing, and in no way reflected what life would be like to come.

The only thing more pointless than my four years spent at the University of Florida were your four minutes spent reading this. See you next week! ✍︎