Entering college for the first time, virtually or otherwise, can be an exhilarating experience, especially when there are so many clubs with so many events that it’s almost impossible to keep up with them. Whether you’re looking to rekindle an interest that your board exams took away or if you’re looking to try something you’ve always wanted to, this club guide is going to tell you where to find what. We’ve put together the flagship events for each club, the exposure they provide and the opportunities they create for a freshie. Each of these clubs create a sense of belonging, along with friendships and experiences that you’ll treasure for life. Go on, find your niche—and if that’s too easy, then carve out your own!
Comedy Club
The sole purpose of this club is to spread laughter. It is open to those interested in trying their hand at stand up comedy and related events. One of their flagship events is the Stand Up Competition, which happens to be Chennai’s largest stand up comedy competition, receiving a diverse audience from all over the country. This is usually a new experience for freshies, but a fun one because the coordinators of the club guide you through the entire process and hone your delivery skills and your ability to make a joke out of mundane things by conducting multiple open mics, content creation workshops with famous stand up comics and a truck load of fun improv events that make it easier for you to step out of your comfort zone. Freshies can volunteer with the club and help organise events such as LitSoc by coming up with innovative ideas to improve the quality of club activities. Even if you don’t wish to participate, you’re free to spectate and laugh at the remarkable (just like whiteboards) jokes.
Quiz Club
IIT Madras holds a rich legacy when it comes to quizzing. This club aims to maintain and further this culture. They provide you questions that cover a gamut of genres. An engaging and accessible activity which helps you gain so much knowledge and learn about the quirky details of the most common things around us, like the fact that Lata Mangeshkar composed under an alias in her early days. Saarang and Shaastra quizzes are known for their brain-racking questions that cover nearly everything under the sun. The club also hosts the prominent IITM Open Quiz at the Madras Minutiae Quiz Fest. The freshies are added to an ever-buzzing WhatsApp group where they’re encouraged to frame and post questions. This group is a great place to gain experience in the field and it also serves as a level playing ground for freshies to quiz on the go. The seniors constantly help freshies gain the prowess required to rise up the quizzing ladder by conducting monthly quizzes and sessions on how to get better. Freshies are primarily expected to research and retain information. This will take them a long way in quizzes and help them set questions as these two elements form the part and parcel of quizzing.
Design and VFX Club
This club aims to teach students the different features of digital designing to students. They conduct multiple workshops to cover all nuances under the large umbrella of digital art, like the UI/UX workshop on design interfaces they conducted during Saarang this year. With an extremely active Instagram page, the design club actively takes part in trending online art challenges under an initiative they like to call Perspectives. Under an activity called Audience Challenge, they post students’ artwork on their Instagram page, for a larger audience to appreciate. This serves as an incentive for budding artists to stay in touch with art. Freshies are required to invest their time to learn at least one designing style and implement this knowledge from time to time. Imagination and creativity is of paramount concern here, so students are often given prompts and are made to design something out of their interpretation of the prompt. This club is all about adapting to new technological developments to facilitate art. Interesting activities like digital face painting, motion graphics and a web comics contest evidence how far ahead they are in the field of digital designing. For those with no prior experience in this domain, the seniors help them start off from the basics, like poster making, and gradually proceed upwards to animation and 2D designing.
E-Sports Club
This club acts as a point of contact for all gamers and aspiring gamers at IIT Madras. Online gaming is usually viewed as an activity where people are virtually connected, but cannot attach an image to the username. This club has added a social element to online gaming by connecting fellow gamers and conducting activities where they can compete against each other. They are constantly exploring new games to add to the list in order to make the club inclusive and accessible for all. The Insti E-Sports league and FIFA Weekender is concentrated with gaming spirit as it attracts a sizeable proportion of the student population. Taking it one step further, their events at Saarang like the Saarang Gameplex serves as a platform to connect gamers across a multitude of colleges. This gives them an opportunity to interact with pro-players from other colleges and develop their gaming skills and soft skills. Freshies can actively participate and learn how to play these games and host tournaments. This serves as a great stressbuster from academics, and students are also monitored regularly to prevent any sort of addiction.
Oratory Club
If you think you can speak for and against the same topic in one breath or use rhetoric to save yourself from a shipwreck, then this is the club for you. This club specialises in both formal and informal oratory events. The club has a friendly environment with seasoned speakers who will guide freshies through the process. Experienced speakers from the various oratory circuits conduct engaging workshops where they go over the rules and also hold a few mock rounds of that event. Just A Minute (JAM), debate and elocution are some of the activities they conduct. Since they involve on-the-spot formulation of points and mostly rely on spontaneous thinking, prior experience holds little value. Freshies are given a chance to organise Saarang events and represent the college in inter-college events as a part of the contingent. They also have an oratory guild where they train students without prior experience to cultivate and hone their skills. The formal events (debate and elocution) tackle extremely serious questions that we are faced with today. On the other hand, the informal events (shipwreck and JAM), also relying heavily on one’s speaking ability, deal with more light-hearted topics which usually generate a laugh of two. Thus, this club has a perfect balance of these two components.
Nova
This is a very flexible club that comes up with new and innovative activities for students to participate in. While they do cover a fixed sphere, they operate across various domains. Initiated to incubate new events in Saarang, the workings of this club depend largely on public interest and experimentation. Some of the ingenious events they organized this year during Saarang are LitFest, where discussions with eminent authors and events in vernacular languages are conducted; AnimeFest, which happens to be the largest Anime event in Chennai, includes fun activities like Manga writing workshops and anime screenings, and also has the patronage of the Japanese Consulate; and Divyakalashakti, which is a talent show for specially abled artists. Nova is quite involved in the events conducted under Saarang’s social campaign theme. Freshies joining this club usually help out with the club’s Saarang events and brainstorm to come up with creative initiatives.
Informals Club
The ultimate way to capitalise on a short break from studies is by taking part in one of the Informals Club activities. They provide a platform for people to socialise and connect while playing some good old games like Treasure Hunt and Cluedo. They pride themselves over the fact that they’re the only club where the phrase, “enthu is all you need”, actually holds true. The clubs is constantly exploring to find new games to keep students engaged. They are also famous for their events at Saarang because taking part in them requires no preparation or prior experience. Freshies can take part in these fun games and try their luck. Apart from this, they can also help organise games. This requires a lot of creativity, but the process is extremely entertaining. Their events cater to everyone, irrespective of the skills they possess. Some of them like “Let’s Talk” is exclusively for freshies to connect with each other and is often enjoyed by extroverts. The Informals Club is also the mastermind behind Fandom Night and Halloween Night. They seem to be getting more and more original, because they had life-sized versions of Angry Birds and Jenga at Saarang. They also try to spice up mundane games with a twist to make them more amusing and fun.
Word Games Club
They call themselves a community of puzzle solvers who love playing around with letters and words. They conduct a wide range of events that involve wordplay, such as cryptic crosswords, Scrabble, What’s The Good Word, and Pun-off, to name a few. They explore new puzzles and put out a lot of content related to this, on their Instagram page. This club is also a GREat way to develop an edge over competitive exams like GRE and GMAT in an enjoyable manner. They host the annual Crossie Open, which brings in the best cryptic crossword solvers from all across the country, and the Scrabble Open in tandem with the Madras Scrabble Foundation. It brings novices and experts together to enjoy the adrenaline rush of an open tournament. The club aims to facilitate mutual learning by posting captivating puzzles on their active WhatsApp group. They also organise informal meets where they solve puzzles together and have alumni share their experience with the club. Some of the prerequisites include a fairly good vocabulary, a penchant for wordplay and a knack for jumbling letters in a word. However, watching or taking part in the events will help you naturally cultivate these skills.
Editor’s note: The Bhargavi Memorial Word Games and Quiz, in memory of our alumna Ms Bhargavi Suryanarayan of the HS12 batch, will be conducted on 29 March by the Department in association with the Quiz Club and the Word Games Club. The event is open to all IITM students, so if you’re interested in the activities of these two clubs, feel free to participate!
This is the first in a series of introductory articles for freshies to learn more about the weird, somewhat daunting but always interesting world that is insti. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Introduction to Clubs, and more articles in the series!
Edited by Abhirami G
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