Starting a Design Club at School
Why and how we started the Retriever Design Club at UMBC
Starting a club at school can be an exciting yet daunting task. The opportunity to show off your passions and ultimately promote a community of shared interests is so thrilling. However, there can be negative speculations that pop up along the way.
You may think the following:
What if people don’t join? What if people don’t see the value that you would be contributing? What if this is deemed a failure?
These were definitely concerns that floated around in my head before establishing the Retriever Design Club. Eventually I got over this doubt I had and started an initiative that has garnered 20 active members, and we’re still growing!
No Design Club?
As I began my Graphic Design education in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, I fell in love with the small classroom settings that were offered. On average, each of my design classes consisted of 12 students. This made each class feel more intimate, enabled us to develop stronger relationships with each other, and gave us more time for critiques. Yay for critiques 🙌! A few of us eventually started a group chat together to facilitate informal critiques, ask questions about class, and just simply chat.
I really enjoyed having a small group of friends helping each other out. I wondered: What if this was expanded out to the rest of the department? So, I thought about having us all join the design club at our school. (I just assumed we had one 😅) To my surprise, our University did not.
Asking Around
How could we not have a Design club?? We had a club for almost every major (Biology, Engineering, Accounting, Physics, etc), but none for design. This had to change. However, I wasn’t sure if others felt this way too. So, I started things off by creating a survey via Typeform to see if there were actually students interested in joining a Design club. In the form, I provided general information on what the purpose of the club would be, asked if they were interested and requested their name/email. I then sent this out to our Visual Arts Listerv.
Afterwards, I regularly checked the survey data every day for the next week. In the end there were 35 respondents that sparked interest in joining! This was awesome! Because of this validation, I had the opportunity to start a whole new club at my school. A club filled with students just as passionate about design as I was. It was exciting but also, well, daunting. Even though 35 students responded, those negative speculations still popped up in my head. I contemplated for a few days on whether or not I should actually form this club. After talking with a few of my professors and classmates, I eventually neglected the bad thoughts and decided to just go for it.
Bootstrapping
At UMBC, you need 5 founding members in order to establish a student organization. So, I asked my friends from my classes and the group chat if anyone would want to jumpstart this club with me. I got 4 super talented folks that were interested and I couldn’t be happier about our founding team. Say hi to Emma, Megan, Grant, and Taylor!
Once we had everyones interests, we filled out a bunch of paper work, attended a few meetings, and waited on approvals from the Student Orgs Committee. This went on for the rest of the Spring semester and the beginning of Summer. We were officially recognized on July 25, 2017. Woohoo!
Design Club!
We are the Retriever Design Club. (More about our name and branding in a later post 😉) Our mission, as stated in our Constitution, is to
Bring together those interested in design in order to form a community that creates opportunity for involvement, education, and dialogue.
We aren’t just open to the Visual Arts Department. We are public to engineers, chemists, psychologists, and anyone that is interested in digital design.
We take on projects from other student organizations, host professional talks, tutorials, and venture out to local design events. We are a silly and fun group of students that ❤️ this space!
Thanks Taylor for proofreading!
Join the Ride
This publication is where we share our thoughts and insights on the club and anything design related. We will also document our process for some of our projects as well. So we invite you to come along the ride and follow our blog and our social media below!
Cheers!
//RDC
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