Clubs open so many doors for you at BU and in COM, and for me, clubs have helped me find friends, gain professional experience, and find communities of like-minded people that have made this big campus feel so much smaller. I wanted to share my experiences with clubs on campus my first-year at BU, so hopefully you can learn from what I’ve learned. So without further ado, here is what I’ve learned about all things clubs.
The best thing about COM is its clubs.
Yeah, I said it *drops mic.* COM classes are great, don’t get me wrong, but the best experiences I’ve had as a student so far have come from the clubs I joined. As a Freshman, I signed up for both WTBU & BUTV10, our radio station and television station, respectively. These clubs are fun, but they also have academic value; through BUTV10 and WTBU, I figured out I really wanted to be a Film & Television major instead of a Journalism major. Without these clubs, I probably would have still been undeclared right now.
Clubs give you professional, hands on experience as soon as you arrive on campus.
I was amazed by how quickly I got hands-on experience through clubs. My third week at BU I walked into a radio show with no idea what being an intern entailed. I quickly found out that being an intern meant I was actually speaking, on-air, with a group of strangers I had literally just met. Within a year, though, those DJs became some of my closest friends, and I was SO much more comfortable using radio equipment and speaking to an audience.
At BUTV, I was immediately trained to use cameras, hang lights, set up boom microphones, and use recording software. The best thing about the television programs at BUTV was that I was able to dabble in many different aspects of television production, and find what I was interested in.
Clubs can help you find friends with similar interests.
Some of my best friends have been made through clubs at BU. Equally valuable, these friends are now professional contacts for my future career. I can’t understate how important clubs have been for me in making a campus of 16,000 undergraduates feel smaller. I truly feel like I’ve found a community through the clubs I’ve been in, and made my transition into college as smooth as possible.
Joining clubs and finding out what you’re not interested in is equally valuable as finding out what you are.
Perhaps the strongest piece of advice I can give you is that even if you drop a club, you still learned something. I dabbled in Journalism-oriented clubs my Freshman year, only to realize it wasn’t my main interest. I soon found that my academic interests weren’t aligned with my extracurriculars, and this realization helped me decide on changing my major. So dive in; join that acapella groups (even if you can’t sing), try out for that comedy group (even though you’re not funny), and find your COMmunity.
