Clubs Day is back at Douglas

DSU hosts for fifth year in a row

By Angela Espinoza, News Editor

This year’s DSU Clubs Days are underway at the New Westminster campus (September 24) and David Lam campus (September 25). Each Clubs Day will feature a variety of student-organized clubs and their respective activities.

“Clubs Days have been happening for about five years now,” said Campus Life coordinator for the DSU, Shaun Dhakar. “Every September at the end of the month is Clubs Day, and also in the winter semester.

“One of the big things that we like to do is get all the clubs to participate, it helps get students to join new clubs and get involved on campus. A lot of the students don’t really know what to do at their campus or [know about] any extra activities, so [Clubs Day] gives students the opportunity to make new friends and show everybody that [the campuses are] really diverse.”

Of the college’s nearly 40 active clubs, at least 12 will be participating in this year’s Clubs Day events. Each club will be in competition for a free pizza party for up to 100 members and guests. Students are asked to check out each club table and decide which has rightfully earned the pizza prize.

“We get students to go around, check out every table,” said Dhakar. “They get a voting slip, and come to the DSU table to pick what club they thought was [best].

“The biggest club on campus is about 75 members; that’s the DSU Douglas College International Association. The good thing about them is because they’re a diverse club, they have big potluck dinners and stuff like that.”

As more clubs have been added to the DSU roster, the diversity of club offerings at Douglas has expanded greatly in the past five years.

“I actually started Clubs Day, that’s what I was hired for,” said Dhakar. “When I was first hired there wasn’t that much activity going around on campus. There was probably two, three clubs that were active.”

Again, that number has ballooned to roughly 40 since Dhakar’s inception. But while Dhakar and the DSU help organize and support college clubs and Clubs Day, they don’t run the clubs themselves.

“Clubs are solely run by the club members,” said Dhakar. “We just administrate the clubs, we deal with the funding. The whole thing about Clubs Day is to get students to run their clubs on their own [and encourage] students.”

Each respective Clubs Day runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and all students are welcome.