On Tuesday, September 3rd, sunny skies gave way to a crowded quad as the numerous clubs of Slippery Rock convened for the bi-annual Involvement Fair.
Arriving at the beginning of both the spring and fall semesters, the Involvement Fair is an event that aims to raise awareness for the various clubs and organizations that are hosted throughout campus and invites students from across all disciplines and majors to get involved.
Melanie Hook, senior computational physics major and president of the Physics and Engineering Club said, “Hopefully we’ll get some non-physics majors out of this. It’s pretty well advertised throughout the department, but we don’t really get people from other departments coming to see us, because we’re kinda scary.”
Hook pitched the club as something of a relaxing “physics-adjacent” club rather than one dedicated entirely to the mathematical subjects of its name.
“[The Physics and Engineering Club] is exactly that: we do some physics related events, but mostly it’s a lot of fun things because our major and our department is so stressful,” Hook explained.
Hook described the general routine of the club’s activities: showcases of movies in the planetarium, speakers both inside and out of the related majors and occasional research presentations from members of the club themselves.
Not all clubs require an association to a major, however, as is the case with many of the greek life associations or, namely, Geek Life.
Geek Life president and senior english creative writing major, Catherine Maskrey said that the club discusses anything and everything involved with geek and related fandom culture at their meetings once a week.
“Personally, I didn’t know about this until a friend of mine talked me into it — she was actually a part of the eboard for it.” Maskrey said. “I went to one of the meetings one night, instantly got interested in it, got hooked, went to it every night… I’m even part of the eboard now too. It’s really fun; I haven’t regretted it since.”
In some cases, such as Hook’s, clubs can even help to ignite passions where they had previously laid dormant and unknown.
“I started out as an exercise science major, but one of my physics professors — we had to take Physics I for that major — converted me to physics,” Hook said. “It’s a really great department to become a part of, so we’re trying to make this club something great as well.”
Thus is the entire purpose of the Involvement Fair: to help students find people that share their interests and for those people to share their interests with others. To that end, the Fair certainly achieves quite a bit of success.
“It just gives our club so much more life,” Maskrey concluded.
