For many students at USC, their freshman year involvement fair is where they first start getting involved on campus. They wander up and down the packed Trousdale Parkway, stopping at the booths that interest them, signing up for club after club and seeing all the possibilities that USC offers to its students. This, however, was not my experience during my freshman-year involvement fair. 

My freshman-year roommate encouraged me to walk through the club fair with them. They thought it would be an excellent way for both of us to find groups to be a part of on campus, and I agreed. So, during the first day of the club fair, we began to walk through the packed involvement fair, and I immediately became overwhelmed. 

There were people every couple of feet handing out pamphlets or asking if I was interested in acapella, robotics or consulting. I quickly shut down and followed my roommate around the involvement fair, keeping my eyes on the ground and waiting for them to finish exploring the clubs so we could get out of the overstimulating mess and get lunch instead. 

I still wanted to get involved on campus this semester, so I began researching what clubs USC offered. This task, however, quickly became frustrating. There was no streamlined way to look through all of the clubs USC had to offer; I often found myself jumping between EngageSC, Instagram and Google, scrounging to find information about the different clubs on campus. To further add to the frustration of the ordeal, when I found clubs I was interested in, there was no way to contact them to express my interest. 

I began venting my grievances to my friends and noticed the involvement fair was not only inaccessible to me but also to many disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent students on campus. Many students had found the sardine-packed Trousdale Parkway hard to navigate, making the fair inaccessible to many students. With this realization, I reached out to the assistant director of USC’s Student Assembly for Accessibility, Gwendolyn Smith.

Smith, a junior majoring in international relations, is a student with a disability who regularly advocates for accessibility on USC’s campus. We discussed how the current set up of USC’s club fair makes learning about clubs almost impossible for students with everything from social anxiety to mobility-related disabilities, and we landed on the solution of having clubs use an online platform to make club recruiting on campus more accessible to all. 

The idea is that every club registered with the University would be required to upload an elevator pitch-style video about their club, a visual aid, a written description, and the club’s social media and contact information to a centralized digital platform such as a website. 

The online format would allow students to access information about clubs at any time in a smooth and efficient way, eliminating many of the frustrations that students with disabilities currently have. Having both an audio pitch and a transcription of the audio pitch will make club hunting more accessible for students with visual and auditory disabilities. 

This format would also eliminate the challenge of navigating through large crowds to learn about clubs, which can often be a barrier for students with anxiety, autism and mobility disabilities. The option to access this website at any time would also allow students with chronic illnesses to explore the clubs on campus when they are able to comfortably do so, as the in-person club fair can become inaccessible for students with chronic illnesses when they are having flare-ups or other symptoms that prevent them from participating in the in-person fair. 

Not only is this easy to implement, but would be helpful for all students on campus, disabled or not. Implementing a centralized club recruiting website for all USC clubs will help more students on campus who are eager to get involved and make the most of their time at USC. Having one digital place for students to access the clubs that they are interested in would provide students with a less stressful and more accessible club recruiting experience. 

Making this change makes the club fair a far more equitable opportunity for all of the students with disabilities on campus, allowing them to have equal access to the opportunities that USC’s involvement fair has to offer. By taking the time to implement this change, USC would be helping invest in the happiness and well-being of all of its students — regardless of their disability status. 

If you are a student with a disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence and/or an ally to those communities — and looking for a community here on campus — I would encourage you to keep up with Smith at the SAA. You can follow Smith’s journey on the SAA Instagram @usc.saa.