Oct. 12, 2015
April Wefler
[email protected]
Clubs and organizations that wish to remain active are being asked by Student Life and Leadership to renew their Mountain Lion Connect portals.
If clubs come to SLL and want to renew after the deadline, Oct. 12, they won’t be denied.
Once renewals are submitted, SLL reviews them and the club has then completed registration.
Students that want to create a new club need to find three UCCS students and turn in an application on MLC, which SLL reviews.
Once the new club is approved, at least one club officer needs to attend a new club orientation workshop.
Clubs that register or renew in the fall are set for the rest of the academic year.
Shawn Partin, president of Bedlam Knights, said the renewal process was easy this semester, but has been difficult in the past.
“We’ve done it before, so it was just pretty much next, next, next,” said Partin, senior computer science major.
Tiffany Yep, program assistant for SLL, said that since the implementation of MLC, the office has been able to track club activity better than in the past.
“What will happen after this renewal period ends is that any club that has a portal in Mountain Lion Connect that did not renew during that period, then their portal will be inactivated,” Yep said.
She said clubs that don’t renew their portals indicate to SLL that students are not taking charge of the clubs, which leads to them being considered inactive.
“As long as they have a portal on Mountain Lion Connect, we will tell them the steps that they need to just update their portal on Mountain Lion Connect and then they will essentially be activated again,” Yep said.
She said SLL does not keep track of whether clubs are actually doing what they say they’re doing.
“Our office does not micromanage club activity,” Yep said. “It’s not like we have someone from our office going to club meetings to check to make sure that people are meeting. That’s not our job and that’s not why we’re here.”
She said SLL exists to support clubs and to guide them to accomplish what they’d like to.
“Club activity for one club may look very different than club activity for another club,” Yep said. “A chess club meeting is probably going to look very different from a karate club meeting.”
Yep said some clubs meet weekly, but never seek funding because they don’t have events. Anytime a club does have an event, it needs to turn in an event registration form to SLL and then SLL determines whether to provide funding for the event.
“A club doesn’t have to put on a club event in order to be a club,” she said.
Yep said that often they have to adapt to the events clubs come up with.
“We don’t want to limit clubs to only certain types of events or ideas. We want to encourage them to come up with new ideas,” she said.
“A lot of times, a club may come up with a brand-new idea that’s never been done here before and so we just need to look in to OK, what do we need to do in order to make that possible,” she said.