While most students were off-campus during the past year due to COVID-19, two new student organizations have spurred and gained traction.These clubs are Stevens Linux Users Group (SLUG) and the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), among others.
The process to become a new registered student organization is run through the Student Government Association (SGA). The clubs mentioned above applied in the Fall 2020 semester and have just recently been able to hold events and gain wider representation across campus. These clubs were developed for a common reason: they felt Stevens was missing something that the student body could benefit from and had interest in.
SLUG is an organization dedicated to the education and support of free and open source software (FOSS) development and the use of open source operating systems at Stevens. Tyler Kaminski, a 3/3 Computer Science major and founder of SLUG, said, “There’s a lot of classes that ask you to know this stuff. They don’t teach it so we have to go outside of the class to learn it. That’s where this club comes in.” The other founders include Jacob Gerega, Mitchell Reiff, and James Labayna.
In a different vein, ALPFA offers business students an opportunity to join a professional society tailored to their area of study. ALPFA is a Latino-based, but not exclusive, national professional business society. Their mission is to empower and develop Latino men and women as leaders of character for the nation, in every sector of the global economy. Its founders are Ivan Arias, Camilo Lobos, Nicole Veraja, Ivy Robalino, and Marissa Conde. Ivan Arias, a 5/5 Business and Technology major and founder said, “The business school is growing rapidly, yet we don’t have a nationally recognized professional society on our campus.” ALPFA differs from the Society of Hispanic Engineers (SHPE) because it is tailored for business students at its core. Their resources include but are not limited to investment banking, marketing, entrepreneurship, and management. SHPE is focused on engineering—“a lot of our founding members were part of SHPE (2 of us are previous E-board members), and in many ways our mission and vision are very closely related,” said Arias. The two clubs share the same cultural demographic and mission, but that is where their similarities end.
Kaminski and Arias both admitted that it was an uphill battle in the early phases of club development. Each semester, the SGA Vice President of Student Interests (VPSI) announces the beginning of the Interest Period in which any individual interested in forming a new Student Organization (SO) must submit a New Organization Request Form. Once it is submitted, the proposer will have a meeting with the VPSI and a staff member from the Office of Undergraduate Student Life. Following the meeting, there’s a vote which must be unanimous. Because SLUG and ALPFA went through this process during the pandemic, once they entered step two, they found it difficult to gain traction.
According to the SGA’s New Organization Process 2020 document, during step two the new organization must do the following:
- Develop positions for an Executive Board or other system of officials (e-board);
- Think of purpose-relevant events;
- Draft a constitution;
- Establish a rough budget, and;
- Quantify student body interest.
In Winter 2020, both SLUG and ALPFA moved to step two. Kaminski said, “During COVID we couldn’t have GBMs but we just talked to people to gain interest.” The founding members also set up a Discord server that potential members and interested students could join to discuss open source projects. They currently have over 100+ members in the server which can be accessed at this link. They are currently working on a website, and the code can be found in their Github at this link.
Not only were the founders faced with the difficult task of creating a club during quarantine, but they were also facing personal challenges that arose due to the pandemic. Arias said, “A lot of us had to step back and take care of our own before we could be focused on school again, let alone a new organization.” They have received immense support from ALPFA on a regional and national level which has made them feel more at ease. Being that ALPFA is a national organization, the founders must be sure they are on track and up-to-date with Stevens and ALPFA requirements.
This semester, ALPFA has hosted an Opening GBM, a Cover Letter Workshop, co-hosted Part One of the Building Equity series with AΦA and NSBE, and co-hosted a consulting speaker event with multiple chapters in their region. They want to bring change and representation to campus by hosting events such as these.
Currently, SLUG is in step two of the new organization process and ALPFA is in step three preparing applications for step four. The SLUG founders hope to move forward to the next step to branch out into more software/hardware projects and fundraise for more comprehensive open source global projects. They also hope to host workshops to help students gain skills they do not get in their classes “like Git. It is a bit of an involved process, and professors don’t want to teach that.”
The expansion of clubs on campus gives Stevens students a wider variety of clubs that suit their interests. Students interested in creating their own organization should keep an eye out in the beginning of each semester for an email from the VPSI announcing the Interest Period.
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