A new program called Club Coffee Connections offers advising to students searching for ways to get involved in clubs and activities at the University of Oregon.
Club Coffee Connections, which started this school year, is a program run by the Center for Student Involvement that aims to help students get involved in clubs and organizations on campus. The program runs every Friday from 9 to 11 a.m. in the Center for Student Involvement in the EMU.
Students who attend the event are first welcomed with coffee and tea where they will then meet with an involvement coach and discuss interests, goals and academics.
Avalon Mason, the Student Services Coordinator for CSI, explained that the involvement coaches will begin with a consultation session.
“What kinds of work are you looking for? What’s your major? Are you looking for something that supplements that? Are you looking for something that’s a palate cleanser from that?” Mason said. “There’s so many different things out there. So I think getting a sense of what that person is looking for can be really helpful.”
After talking with their involvement coach, students will move to using the online program called Engage which lists and describes all student-run organizations at the UO.
“[Using Engage] sort of streamlines the process of us being able to help people who are looking or are interested in student organizations or specific types of clubs, or are seeking out a certain kind of experience,” said Tré Garnett, an Event Assistant at the CSI and an involvement coach for the program.
Along with Club Coffee Connections, the CSI offers many weekly events for students to get involved — including Monday night game nights and Fish Bowl Fridays.
“The broader focus of the Center for Student Involvement is exactly that, student involvement,” Garnett said. “We want to create different kinds of initiatives and spaces where students are able to engage with the university or with organizations that they are interested in or just have comfortable-easy-access spaces to spend time”
Mason explained that the CSI tries to have a safe engagement event every night of the week. The idea behind Club Coffee Connections was to create an event that further engages students in their own lives.
Club Coffee Connections is open to anyone, but Mason also hoped to specifically target “transfer students or second term freshman who are just not finding their place as quickly as they had hoped to.”
With more than 250 student groups at the UO, it can be overwhelming narrowing down which clubs to join.
Coltrane Liu, a freshman at the UO, is a member of the The Synapse neuroscience club and the Campus Comedy Club. He explained how being a part of a club has been an interesting and overall beneficial experience.
“Going to clubs is like, trying something that you never will have to do, or never will need to do, but it’s still cool because it always can shed some light wherever you are focusing,” Liu said. “I think everyone should get to go outside their comfort zone every once in a while and just go to like a 45 minute meeting on something that you might not have thought about. And then to have that just kind of floating around your head for the week.”
Members of the Club Coffee Connections team hope to offer students a place to get involved in the many clubs and organizations at the UO.
“Hopefully, people who are interested in anything outside the classroom will find this a useful space,” Garnett said.