Welcome to the club!
Have you always dreamt of speaking one more language? Or maybe it is just interesting for you to learn something new? Perhaps, you enjoy watching anime or baking cakes? Even if you have no interest in any of these things, it is still ok. Because there is a club for everyone at ITMO University. As soon as you are enrolled, you can join and create any clubs.
How to start?
It does not matter if you are a first or a third year student, if you want to start a club. The idea can come up quickly or it can take you a while. Not necessarily but when you are a freshman, everything seems and looks so frightening, you can hardly think of starting a club. When you are a sophompre, you get more confident, but you have no time. Sometimes things like a global pandemic happen as well and mess up all your plans. Finally, when you are a third year student, university itself gives you this great opportunity.
Soft Skills help students to break the ice
These days employers are interested in soft skills as much as in hard skills. Maybe even a little bit more. They look for candidates with such attributes as:
Problem-solving, self-direction, adaptability, effective communication skills, flexibility, listening skills, empathy, taking responsibility, self-control, conflict resolution.
These skills are difficult to teach and they are important for long-term success. Therefore, Soft Skills are studied at ITMO University as a separate subject. Every semester students choose one “Soft Skills” course to study. It could be “Public speaking”, “Storytelling”, “Teamwork” and many others. One of those courses for third year students is called “How to start and manage a Student Club”. This course gives every student an opportunity to learn all the details about ITMO clubs and how to manage them.
First thing you learn is how many different clubs are already there. The surprising part is that actually there are a lot of them. You can find all these clubs on the ITMO University website, guaranteed you will discover all kinds of clubs in every direction. Probably, your dream-club already exists. Nevertheless, let us deal with this in the right way.
Then you will learn key concepts like “club” definition, funding possibilities, logistical subtleties etc. You will also be taught how to use practical tools, for instance how to create a logo, what are acceptable club names and descriptions, size of the picture for the club logo and how to fill out an application for the student club. Of course, your tutors will always be there for you to help.
Next step is a real student club creation and this is where things get interesting. Your journey begins. To be more precise let us talk about this spring term course. At this stage, all students split into small groups according to their interests, think of club names, promoting ideas, and the most important — purposes. Those guys made up a lot of unusual and exciting club names such as “Toxic relationships club”, “extreme club”, “Netflix fans club” and “German-speaking club”.
As soon as all groups are ready, they develop a detailed strategy for the next two months and start promoting their clubs. The main goal of all those efforts is to hold a first club meeting by the end of the spring term
As an example, a brand-new German-speaking club created a vk-community for those who always wanted to learn a foreign language but never had the opportunity to start. Every day they post interesting phrases and words in German. Usually they use topically relevant for students phrases like “I am exhausted”, “I’m so sick of it”, “Procrastination”. Their first meeting took place virtually on zoom on May 7st. If you missed it this is fine because they are happy to meet everyone and explain all the basic rules for those people who are interested in cooperating with them. You can always join the community wischi-waschi and come to the next meeting.
That was just one example of many other student clubs. Even if you are just a fast food fan or you are interested in astrophysics, in both cases it is possible for you to find a few like minded people and start your own club. University is doing everything to facilitate this process.
Written and visualised by Khozeeva Maria
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