Interclub Council releases survey about eating club admissions

The Interclub Council released a survey via email on March 25 designed to collect feedback from sophomores who registered to participate in the eating club admissions process this year based on their experiences joining a club or using the updated ICC website.“We’re always looking to explore ways to improve the club admissions process, and an important part of that effort is getting the feedback of people who participated,” ICC president Connor Clegg ’14 explained. “That was the main idea behind releasing the survey.”

The survey includes 11 multiple-choice questions with additional space for participants to submit comments in addition to their responses and a final prompt encouraging students to offer any suggestions that might guide the ICC in improving the eating club admissions process.

The questions ask students to rank how easily they navigated the new eating club admissions website, what additional information about the clubs they would have found useful at the time of application, why they might have chosen to abstain from the new multi-club Bicker process and whether students would feel more compelled to participate in multi-club Bicker if the process allowed them to bicker more than two eating clubs.

According to Clegg, the ICC had no specific reforms in mind when they developed the survey and said that any discussion of changes would prove premature before the ICC understood how the sophomores who were directly involved in this year’s eating club selection felt about the process.

“All options are on the table right now. There has been no specific talk about changing the system,” he said. “A big part will be the opinions of people who went through the process.”

Eating club officers encountered few problems with the new multi-club Bicker system designed by the ICC during its inaugural year, according to Cap & Gown president Justin Perez ’14. He explained that there were a couple of mistakes in notifying bickerees of their placement, but he said those were human errors and could not be attributed to failures in the program itself.

Although one of the questions asked if the possibility of bickering more than two of the selective clubs at one time would encourage students to take advantage of multi-club Bicker, Perez said he doubted the ICC would implement a change this year.

“I think in the near future, we’ll probably just stick with two,” Perez said.

However, both Perez and Clegg emphasized the importance of reviewing feedback from the sophomores who participated in the eating club admissions process before changing any policy related to it.

Making the Street a more attractive option for sophomores is one of the goals of the recently released survey and a goal of the ICC itself, according to Clegg.

“We love to encourage people to keep answering those questions because the answers will all be taken into account in the decision of how to move forward best,” he added.

Representatives of the other four bicker clubs either could not be reached by press time or declined to comment for this article.