On Wednesday, Oct. 8, students across the Claremont Colleges gathered at Walker Beach to explore various newly launched and revived clubs at the 5C Fresh Club Fair. As the autumn sun set across the lawn, students conversed and wandered around different club tables with flyers, banners, QR codes and candy.
The new club fair welcomed around a dozen new and revived student-run clubs in addition to those that were unable to attend the first 5C club fair on Sept. 3. The event featured a wide array of clubs — including the 5C Pens & Poetry Club, The Women’s Network, GRAFT, iGem, FLIP (Financial Literacy and Investing at Pomona), 5C Cheer Team, Claremont Muay Thai and the Food Recovery Network.
Pens & Poetry, a creative writing club that seeks to foster an environment of student writers with workshops, writing circles, open mics and guest speakers, made their first public appearance at the fair. Sakeenah Abraham PO ’29, the chief commissioner of Pens & Poetry, expressed the club’s goal to make creative writing more accessible and inclusive to students at the 5Cs.
“We wanted to make [a club] that really values creative writing,” Abraham said. “Students of all different skill levels [are] important to us. I don’t think you necessarily need to have published poetry or have even taken a class before.”
Pherell Washington PO ’29 agreed with Abraham, in addition to noting the importance of club involvement on campus as an outlet for community building.
“I think it’s so important to get involved with things on campus, keeping yourself occupied, building that community, building those new connections,” Washington said. “[It’s important] just having somewhere be an outlet for you — like poetry is an outlet for me, and I feel like it can be for a lot of other people.”
Another club at the fair, GRAFT, was established this semester as the first multilingual magazine at the 5Cs, aimed at celebrating linguistic diversity and providing a platform for students who speak more than one language.
“The purpose of our club is to ultimately create a magazine that features writings from different languages, across the 5Cs,” Peter Zhang PO ’29, a club leader of GRAFT, said. “The name means an intersection between two clubs that are connected together, and ‘graft’ is also a medical term which means to sew two sections together.”
In addition to freshly launched clubs, several previously frozen clubs that were revived this semester made their appearance at the fair. Revived clubs included the 5C chapter of The Women’s Network and FLI Scholars.
The 5C chapter of The Women’s Network, which became frozen sometime during the pandemic, was revived and reorganized by Kate Humphreys SC ’27 this semester.
The Women’s Network is the largest national women’s networking organization that aims “to cultivate and celebrate women’s ambition by connecting members to industry leaders, professional development resources and career opportunities,” according to their website.
“We’re really into setting up women for success within their career paths,” Humphreys said. “We do LinkedIn workshops, resume workshops, we’re hoping to do some speaker panels, but I know that career stuff can get kind of stressful, so we’re also hoping to do community workshops or community events as well.”
Unlike other revived clubs that had been inactive for years, FLI Scholars — a club for first-generation and/or low-income students — was frozen temporarily last semester due to funding constraints. Leaders of FLI Scholars appeared at the new club fair as they were unable to attend the first club fair on Sept. 3.
“It’s nice to have students alongside you who have similar experiences in life and know that when you’re talking about filling out FAFSA — they know what that is or they know what it’s like to be on public benefits,” Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene PO ’26 said. “I like community building because it’s low stress and it just lets people hang out.”
Juan Fuentes PO ’29, an executive board member on Pens & Poetry, emphasized how the small student population at the 5Cs has resulted in potential downfalls but also created new opportunities for students to take initiative.
“Because student population is a lot lower than other colleges or universities [at the 5Cs], sometimes clubs can die out if the leadership dies out,” Fuentes said. “But I think that also creates an opportunity for new students in that while there’s a large amount of diversity, there’s also a few gaps from things that have maybe fallen over the years, or that aren’t as active anymore, and there are opportunities for new students to go into leadership and to start these initiatives and hopes.”
With dozens of club leaders and countless students, the 5C Fresh Club Fair fostered a sense of community on campus –– bringing students together around shared passions and the potential for new experiences.
During the fair, student attendees shared their support for the new clubs and sense of community on campus.
“A couple of our friends [are] starting a club, so we just wanted to show up and support them,” attendee Shadrack Martin PO ’29 said.
For leaders, the fair was an opportunity to promote their club and connect with other new clubs on campus. For attendees, the fair was an opportunity to discover and explore interests outside the classroom and beyond what the first club fair had to offer. The 5C Fresh Club Fair not only highlighted a diversity of student-led organizations, but it also reflected a highly driven and collaborative campus culture rooted in initiative and innovation.
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