UGA Clubs Adapting During Pandemic

The pandemic has impacted many organizations at UGA in many ways. Because of social distancing guidelines and UGA regulations, clubs have altered the way they run on a day-to-day basis.

Due to the pandemic, student run organizations at the University of Georgia are being impacted in a major way. Events have been cancelled. Experiences have been ruined. Participation has dwindled. Clubs had to adapt just to survive.

“I believe that we ideally were able to reach and connect with some of these children in a rather indirect way,” said Surendra Mahadeo, the former executive director of a club at UGA called Inspire. “But the pandemic overall, imperiled and lessened some of the things that we normally would work very hard to relate to these kids.”

Inspire promotes the benefits of higher education to Athens eighth graders, mainly with an annual event called Day as a Dawg.

“We were still insistent that we wanted to have something for our students to look back upon. We took our activities, we had games like Bingo, The Price is Right, trivia, just fun activities for the kids to learn and we had games like that, that we ended up just sort of converting into a PowerPoint form.”

Inspire’s struggles during the pandemic are not unique. Since the beginning of COVID, clubs and organizations at UGA have been forced to alter plans to comply with safety guidelines and social distancing.

“With this dog, it’s kind of been more me changing my schedule, or maybe I don’t need to go to the store today, but we can go and do a quick training session and then leave,” said Allison Green. “So it’s a little harder in that you could have to plan for it and figure out what’s safe and appropriate.”

Green has raised two dogs through the Guide Dog Foundation, another UGA club, before the start of the pandemic. She found it more challenging to raise her third dog during the pandemic.

“She probably goes on less than half of the amount of outings that my other dogs had been on. So for her that meant she also got to work on her like house manners and things like that a lot more than my other dogs have. For some of our dogs, it’s a little difficult and causes a couple problems with that.”

Some organizations also struggled to keep up participation among their members. With social distancing guidelines, meetings are difficult to have in person.

“I think this is kind of sad, but I think that it being online, like, has affected the numbers greatly,” said Sylvia Bui, the public relations chair for the Vietnamese Student Association. “Our e-board works really hard to just like, try to make online programming really interactive for all the members, but sadly, you know, no ones gonna want to go on to an online meeting.”

On top of lower participation, she thinks members are not able to have the same level of experience online, rather than in person.

“I think the freshmen coming in right now are missing out on a lot of things. I think being online really disconnects us.”

Green thinks the process of raising a dog during the pandemic was more difficult than the two she raised before.

“If I had a dog in the pandemic, I would probably have a harder time kind of connecting that like this dog is not my dog, and this dog is not my pet dog.”

Mahadeo had a similar feeling regarding his time with Inspire.

“I don’t think that the experience was comparable at all in terms of the magnitude that would have liked to achieve.”

With the end of the pandemic in sight, clubs at UGA are looking forward to returning back to normalcy.