Evergreen students connect with clubs and community at quarterly activities fair

Last Wednesday, Evergreen hosted a student activities fair featuring student club advisors tabling in the library lobby. Held every quarter and coordinated by the Department of Student Activities, the event united hundreds of students with over 30 student leaders promoting their clubs and organizations.

Jodi Santillie, senior advisor in the student activities department, helps organize the event. “The student activities fair is full of opportunities and sets the tone for student engagement in extracurriculars throughout the quarter,” she says.

“I love to see the connections being built for a students’ educational career,” adds Anthony Arriola, senior secretary of student activities.

Students can engage in a variety of campus groups, such as Black Focus, Geoduck Student Union (student government), Lucid Dreamers, the Cooper Point Journal, and Technosapiens. Many of the student clubs and organizations are led by students who are passionate or interested in digging deeper on a specific topic or issue.

Rachel Allen says joining Lucid Dreamers, a club that she now leads, enhanced her mental and physical health. “Once I was able to start tracking my sleep and dreams, I could start to live a better life,” she says.

Zoe Wagner is a student coordinator who started a club last year to discuss the effects of technology usage. “We all have the influences of technology, but there wasn’t really a community to discuss the impacts of that,” she says.

Since a student group technically only needs four members for approval to function, many students team up with their classmates to create a club that is based off their academic studies. Evergreen senior Tyrone Cawston is a coordinator of the Native Students Alliance and is also enrolled in Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development.

“My class gives me the context of knowledge; my club gives me a community to put that knowledge into action,” says Cawston.

Emily Christianson currently works as the speaker of the Geoduck Student Union (GSU) and as the chair of the GSU communications committee. “Clubs are especially an important part of student life [at Evergreen] since we don’t have fraternities or sororities,” she said.

Christianson, who was hosting a table for GSU, stressed the importance of the student activities fair for students looking to make deeper connections on campus. “I love the student activities fair, it is a primary resource for networking and outreach and I can’t imagine not having it,” she says.

For more information or inquiries for extracurriculars at Evergreen, you can visit https://www.evergreen.edu/activities.