UCLA should increase access to clubs by providing improved online resources

The defining UCLA experience is trying to avoid organizations flyering on Bruin Walk.

Clubs must accost students as they head to class or swarm Dickson Plaza each fall for the Enormous Activities Fair to ensure everyone knows they exist. If only a website existed for students to find all these organizations without the daily hassle.

There is, but it’s extremely uninformative.

Students can access information about active clubs on campus through the MyUCLA website’s “Student Organizations” tab, which is run by Student Organizations, Leadership and Engagement. The website hypothetically allows students to search for active clubs and join them with a simple click of a “Join Organization” button.

But upon further inspection, this “Join Organization” button merely informs students via an automated email that they’ve joined a club, and sends a notification to club leaders that someone clicked the button – though for all intents and purposes, the student may not have actually joined the club. Moreover, SOLE’s qualifications for an active club are only that they have a constitution and three signatories, but not that they actively recruit students or do any activities.

Clearly, MyUCLA’s “Student Organizations” tab is ineffective and even misleading to students. SOLE should work with MyUCLA developers to update the site and give students more accurate information on how to join campus groups. SOLE should also ensure the website only lists active clubs that are verified through a strict process that extends beyond the current meager requirements.

While club leaders tend to use the tab on MyUCLA, that’s not true of many prospective club members who could benefit from an updated and more thorough website.

“I don’t know anyone in our club that has used the SOLE website to join,” said Sabrina Belen, a fourth-year biology student and finance director of Connecting Californians to Care Undergraduate.

A notable number of the clubs listed on MyUCLA don’t seem to be active. Some don’t respond to emails listed on MyUCLA, and others’ website links lead to error pages. Furthermore, the clubs’ social media accounts are not listed.

This leaves students with the task of emailing the SOLE office to discern whether a club actually exists apart from on the website. But SOLE does not oversee club activity: Unless students raise specific concerns, the office merely confirms that club signatories are affiliated with UCLA and have an email on file.

Many of the clubs on the MyUCLA website are registered, but may not be ready to take on new members or to host meetings and events, said SOLE Director Mike Cohn. While there are advisors assigned to each group to help them grow, that doesn’t always happen.

Clubs should not be listed as active simply because a student registered by drafting a constitution and gathered three signatories, as meeting those requirements doesn’t necessarily ensure the groups are active.

For example, the American Red Cross club at UCLA is listed as active on MyUCLA, but the links to the American Red Cross club’s website direct to an error page. Additionally, the Bruins United for Reproductive Justice club, which is also listed as active on MyUCLA, does not have any social media sites or websites listed and is unresponsive to email.

Some students don’t even know about the website or SOLE’s ability to help them find a club and have to resort to their own devices to find out how to join student clubs. For example, Sherrielyn Duran, a first-year international development studies student, said she gave up on joining a club she discovered during New Student Orientation, despite scouring the web for the club, searching for representatives on Bruin Walk and attending the Enormous Activities Fair.

The “Student Organization” tab in its present form just doesn’t deliver to students. SOLE, however, can address the MyUCLA tab’s problems by implementing stricter guidelines for clubs to be deemed active, including that they need to be ready to take on new members and host events or lead activities.

Although stricter guidelines might prevent fledgling clubs that are not yet putting on events from being listed as active on MyUCLA, SOLE can work with website developers to add labels describing whether clubs are still developing. While this would require SOLE to interact more with club leaders, that kind of extra effort is required to ensure students aren’t lost when it comes to finding clubs.

Any website meant to inform students about their options on campus should be accurate and helpful. It shouldn’t confuse an already muddy process of finding a club at UCLA with misleading information about what’s out there and how to get involved.

Otherwise, Bruins will be left to navigate the task of finding clubs on their own, relying solely on flyers and word-of-mouth.