Colonial takes 71 more members than last year

Of the five sign-in clubs, Charter Club was the only one to fill to capacity, with an incoming class of 95 sophomores. Cloister Inn, which took in 77 new members in the first round, did not fill but came very close, said Cloister president Jake Sally ’12 in an e-mail.

“We still have room but it’s limited,” added Sally.

Terrace Club’s new sign-in class, at 88 members, is two students larger than last year’s. While it is against Quadrangle Club policy to reveal the exact number of students signing in, president Julia Blount ’12 said in an e-mail that the club’s “first-round numbers are comparable to those we received last year,” which the ‘Prince’ estimated last spring to be around 50.

Cloister received almost 20 more new members than last year’s 58, and 128 students listed Charter as their first choice, compared to 118 in the spring of 2010. Of the 33 students who were not were not offered a spot in Charter during the first round, 10 were placed on a wait-list, according to Charter president Daniel Fletcher ’12.

But no club experienced as drastic a change in membership size as Colonial, which had 84 first-round sign-ins. This is a significant increase compared to last year’s total of 13. Though that low number was explained by then-president David Hou ’11 as a “statistical anomaly” and an inevitable result of “undergraduate mob psychology,” Colonial’s membership had been decreasing, from 115 in 2007 to 103 in 2008 to 87 in 2009. This year’s sharp jump in membership reversed the steep decline that Colonial saw last spring.

Colonial president Susan Zhang ’12 said she noticed significant changes in the way the club was run this past year, which may have revitalized students’ interest in joining the club.

“There simply weren’t enough events going on in the club the previous year,” Zhang said in an e-mail. “We’ve been working very hard the past year to put on a lot more events and open the club to the Street more often, as I feel like that was one of the reasons why last year’s numbers were so poor.”

According to Zhang, there was a conscious effort within the officer corps over the past year to do all they could to bring the size of this year’s first-round sign-ins back up to normal levels. She said that in addition to holding many sophomore dinners and other events to expose interested students to the amenities and atmosphere the club has to offer, the officers worked particularly hard to emphasize to prospective members that the club had the will and financial resources to accommodate their particular interests.

“I was extremely pleased when I found out our first round numbers, although I’m expecting our total number of sign-ins to be even higher,” Zhang said, adding that many students have indicated to her that they plan to join in the second round if they are not admitted into a bicker club.

This was also the first year of Charter’s new point system. Because the club has consistently filled in the first round, in September the officers announced a new system to ensure that those signing in were the most interested and potentially dedicated members. Under the new plan, sophomores were given points based on the amount of events they had attended at Charter, and those with the most points were given priority during sign-ins.

“It worked beautifully,” Fletcher said of how the new system functioned in its debut year. “It was everything we could have asked for and more.”

Terrace, which announced in December that its members and graduate board had agreed to admit graduate students beginning with this year’s sign-in class, is still working out practical details of this with the University. According to president Ricardo Lopez ’12, the financial realities of joining an eating club place a greater burden on graduate students than on undergraduates. While the University subsidizes the cost of joining an eating club for undergraduates who qualify for financial aid, this is not the case for their graduate counterparts. According to Lopez, Terrace is working with the University to try to find a way to ease the financial burden on graduate students in order to make joining a club a more viable option for them.