Flyering in The Wind

Imagine opening the menu at a classy restaurant, only to discover that your favorite dishes are missing and everything else is screaming at you in bright red, size 70 font. Annoying, huh? It’s even more annoying when, instead of ordering food, you’re a Harvard first-year looking for a few extracurriculars. Sure, we first years are bombarded by mountains of flyers, but none of them seem to be from the clubs we want to join.

Waiting in the interminable noon Annenberg line, we are constantly accosted by upperclass students urging us to try out for another a cappella group or comp another student publication. In front of the Science Center, flyer-laden activists shove slips of yellow paper in our faces, exhorting us to join another cause. The unending deluge of paper wrangles my nerves. So does the exorbitant amounts of paper wasted in hand bills, and layered on bulletin boards. Stacks of flyers none of us will ever read inevitably accumulate. But we still keep taking them because, if we didn’t, we’d feel bad for the person handing them out.

Yet for every over-aggressive, paper-wasting club, there is its low-key counterpart that you just can’t seem to reach. I for one have been trying to get in touch with the Road Running club since the summer. I still haven’t heard back from their contact person, and neither has a friend of mine. Another first-year I know has gotten the cold shoulder from the photo club. And it took another friend of mine more than a few trips down to the MAC just to find out where he could sign up for instructional fencing. The list goes on. From an acquaintance who needed to camp out in front of the volleyball coach’s office to my own troubles with the Road Runners, first-years all over campus are having difficulties finding their favored extracurriculars; there is a whole class of clubs on campus that are simply impossible for the average first-year to find.

This is especially frustrating because solutions seem so obvious. “There should be a centralized online location where students can find information for all the clubs,” fellow first-year Joseph B. Musumeci ’07 suggested to me. This make sense. There are plenty of problems with the club websites that do exist right now. But if there were a more accessible and user-friendly online bulletin board, it would be a lot easier for club heads to post basic information—like meeting times and contact information—and a lot easier for us first-years to find it.

Of course, someone will always find the need to hand out flyers and plaster campus. But with some simple, common-sense measures like a new, user-friendly website, we first years might just be able to find the clubs we want, cut down on the upperclass students outside Annenberg and save some trees in the process.

—Loui Itoh is an editorial comper.