Recruiting is Pretty Hard

Hi friends, hope we’re all keeping well.

I just wanted to make a post immortalising my current struggles of recruiting. I’m on the committee for two societies in my college this year, and just today we had a gigantic freshers fair on campus, where almost all sports clubs and societies had a stand and tried to get incoming 1st year students to join.

A few thoughts on this:

1. The biggest highlight and noteworthy thing was that it was incredibly fun. I had a blast talking to new incoming first years and explaining why my societies were so fun and why people should join. It was also nice dabbling in the art of bribery when we exchanged snacks for memberships😃
2. My god were my social batteries completely gone by the end of it. I would consider myself half-introvert and half-extrovert by nature, but today all the heavy-lifting work was done by my extroverted self, and I was completely exhausted by the end of it. I feel like it’s really similar to interrailing, where even though you’re having a blast, you still end up super exhausted by the end of it.
3. Recruiting people is pretty hard. In the first few hours I really had no idea what I was going to say to potential members, but after talking to like 3 or 4 people I eventually formed a sort of ‘script’ in my head that I pretty much followed for the rest of the day when talking to people. It was great when people came up to me on their own volition because they had a genuine interest in the society, but man was it a completely different story when trying to entice mere passer-bys and onlookers (although I suppose that’s obvious). It definitely helped me improve my confidence a bit though, as pretty much everyone today was super nice and respectful.
   But it was nice in general to talk to incoming 1st years, I enjoyed it.

Trinity Freshers Fair was great. During breaks I even had a walk around and tried different societies’ acitivies. Chess, rowing, computer science, it was great craic.

Anyway, moral of the story:

Recruiting people is hard, but the more you open yourself up to people and relax, the easier and more fun it gets.