Andover Business Club

These past few weeks, I’ve been working to start up Andover Business Club. 

Business Club was originally founded by some seniors a couple years ago, but this year, ceased to run.  I was disappointed by this (as someone interested in business), so I contacted the faculty advisor and asked if I could start it up this term.  This past week was Winter 2017 midterms, and just yesterday, ABC ran its first meeting.

It was a long process, with some nooks and crannies to get past.  The process of starting the club up itself was long and tedious, in the sense that I encountered resistance initially and had to find another way to bring across the message.  Starting a club as a freshman, actually, restarting up a club that was previously run by a senior, was difficult.  Last year the culture of the club was simple and limited: all boys from pretty much the same dorm.  This year, one of my goals is to diversify who attends the clubs.  

Contacting last years members was an interesting process.  They were very glued to last year’s idea about starting a business, while I was pushing for a discussion based club about business.  With some consulting from my dad, I felt that running a business on campus was almost guaranteed to fail, and a discussion based club would be more sustainable.  

Advertising came just around the right time.  Club Rally was last Friday, and I made a poster for ABC.  I think one of the things I observed from club rally was what made a club successful in getting people the first round, and what made it difficult (keeping people to stay is a different story).  I felt that being informative, talkative, and give generally good vibes about the people running the club, not even the club itself, was key to getting many people to sign up.  I think many times, simply having interesting and optimistic club leaders will attract people.  

Yesterday, our first club meeting of the 2017-2018 academic year consisted of one thing from me: I prepared a topic before hand.  Since our club is 100% discussion based (no lectures), I just sat by and watched where the discussion would go.  This week’s topic was Apple’s appearance at CES.  They are fairly well known for not attending this show, but for some reason this year they did.  I noticed after about 5 minutes, that the conversation expanded more to Apple as a company in general.  In the future, I’m going to pick more general topics to discuss, because I learned that specific topics are generally too specific to generate enough conversation for 30 minutes.  I’m learning about how people react to certain things, and respond to certain ideas.  Andover is a very diverse place, where people from all different backgrounds come.  Each person brings his or her own opinion.  

This club is starting up halfway through the year, while other clubs have already stabilized with the Fall Club Rally kickoff. It’s going to be hard, but the team is up for the fight.  

I also started a blog for ABC: andoverbusinessclub.blogspot.com.