SOFI PASCUA: Northwestern is home to nearly five hundred clubs and organizations, many of which allow students to pursue unique and unusual passions.
[Survivor theme music]
DREW SLAGER: Survivor NU: we basically put on Northwestern’s version of the show Survivor. So we cast a bunch of people, we plan a bunch of challenges, we have them compete, and then the players all have to like talk strategy and vote each other out.
SP: That’s Communications senior Drew Slager, a member of Survivor NU.
DREW SLAGER: My sophomore year, I applied, and I got cast in the game. So I played it, played for a long time, and it was really fun, met lots of cool people. So since then, I’ve been on prod, and for this current season, I’m one of the challenge chairs, and I’m also one of the co hosts.
SLAGER: So, I think definitely my love of like games, like I’ve seen every single season of Survivor, I’ve seen a bunch of other shows that are very similar definitely helps us think of like different ideas and twists and challenges and what we can incorporate to keep it fresh, because we do want Survivor Northwestern to be its kind of own thing at the end of the day.
SP: While many students can find existing organizations that fit their niche interests, others aren’t so lucky. This was the case for Weinberg sophomores Miles Heck and Natalie Roots-Nowakowski, founders of the Northwestern Cartography Club.
MILES HECK: The geography department was closing, and there was a lot of people who were interested in geography. There was no space to come together to talk about maps. Or play games. So we wanted to start it.
NATALIE ROOTS-NOWAKOWSKI: Essentially, every week we get together and prepare a topic for the meeting, whether that be, like, students being able to lecture and share about like some passion that they have about geopolitics or creating a game, be it like Jeopardy, logic puzzles, map dating, or some activity, like talking about meme maps, or um, trying to best recreate a map of the world or Northwestern.
DARASIMI BANKOLE: Sometimes, people just need to smile. A place to laugh and have fun, in the midst of midterms or finals or just because. Since 2008, The Happiness Club at Northwestern has offered a joyous space for Northwestern students. McCormick senior Zachary Gerstenfeld has been president of the Happiness Club for the past year and a half.
ZACHARY GERSTENFELD: In the Fall and sometimes in the Spring, we do kind of just like a random outdoors activity event and this fall, we had a lot of people come out and really want to do hopscotch, and so we had like a solid team of like ten, fifteen people building a massive hopscotch thing right in front of Deering and then random people would come and try it and it was just a lot of fun.
DB: For music lovers at Northwestern, they have found community in the Music Tasting Club. Similar to a book club, students gather weekly to discuss various music genres and explore new tastes. Founder and president Archie Silverstein explained where his inspiration for the club came from.
[“Wild Is The Wind” by Nina Simone]
ARCHIE SILVERSTEIN: So about like late 2022, I started watching like music reviewers on Youtube and that kind of got me passionate about it, it was like – I thought, if they’re passionate about music, surely there must be something to this music. So I started listening to albums and started loving them, but I realized that like my stuff I was listening to was kind of alternative and I didn’t have a ton of like people in my life I could talk with about it. At the same time, I was taking this history of rock class and essentially during the class, he would like play a song for like 2-4 minutes and we’d just sit in silence and listen to it and at the end, we’d discuss and I thought well what if I just do that but for music I like
DB: Throughout Northwestern, there are a multitude of clubs where students can find their specific interests. And if you’re out there listening and feel like there’s not a club that piques your interest, you can always create a new club!
DB: For WNUR News, I’m Darasimi Bankole,
SP: And I’m Sofi Pascua.