• Fri. Apr 19th, 2024

Here’s Henry: Form Your Own Student Organization

Last week I wrote a piece on making the most of your time at Sinclair. This involved finding groups and clubs to join to become more integrated with the campus and the city of Dayton.

While there are many great clubs around (African American Male Initiative, Brite Signal Alliance, Phi Theta Kappa, Art Club, Student Senate and The Clarion) perhaps you want to make your own group dedicated to something you enjoy with other students, such as sports, music or video games.

For this article, let’s say you want to make a club dedicated to professional wrestling. Here is the list of steps on how to get your group off the ground.

Step 1: First off you have to be a Sinclair student, and you have to look at the list of current student organizations and make sure no other group serves the same purpose.

There are no groups at Sinclair currently dedicated to the Macho Man Randy Savage, so continue!

Step 2: Prepare a mission statement for the group. It should be roughly two to three sentences long and serve as the pitch you’ll give to potential advisors and club members you’ll be trying to gather.

This should include some of the benefits that the group’s existence will bring to the Sinclair community.

Step 3: Find an advisor. Advisors are a Sinclair employee who volunteers their time to help mentor the club and many times handle some of the more tedious parts of the job, such as paperwork. It’d probably be best in this example to find a professor that really enjoys wrestling.

Step 4: Ask your advisor to complete a charter application. These are located online from the advisor’s Sinclair email account.

Step 5: Remind the advisor to check their email from the Student Engagement office with an outline of the next steps in the process.

Step 6: Recruit members to join the organization. The minimum number needed to start the club is 10, and I’m sure through some marketing techniques you can find at least 10 wrestlemaniacs to enjoy the art of fake sports with you.

When you have your members of the Cenation, every member of the group, as well as the advisors will have to read and acknowledge the Student Code of Conduct/Honor Code.

Step 7: Finally, you’ll need to draft up a constitution for the group, explaining the club’s purpose, organizational structure, mission statement, rules and guidelines for those entering the group and any amendments that will need to be added.

Once it’s finished and sent to the Student and Community Engagement office, it’ll be reviewed and approved if everything is in order.

There seems to be a sense that Sinclair is a get-in, get-out college where you don’t spend a whole lot of time stopping to smell the roses or making long-lasting connections.

But hidden away here are several clubs filled with great people, and the potential to make your own organization where you can bodyslam your contemporaries to your heart’s content. If anyone wants to start that wrestling club, I’m in.

Henry Wolski
Associate Editor