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Communication, Art + Technology
Vice President
Student
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We had a lot of home-stay students at my house when I was growing up. Sometimes they would have manga and I would get interested in reading comics because you know, what kid doesn't like reading comics? What kid doesn't like the manga art style? I started getting into it around the last year of high-school. I had enough of an interest that I was able to make friends with the former president of the Manga Club in our first year, and in our second year, we started thinking about making the Manga Club.

In starting the club, I do recall working together with the President on doing all the paperwork and the back-end stuff to actually get the club up and registered. We needed to get some members, become an official club on the SFSS portal, and organize the first few meetings we essentially had to learn that stuff together. As time went on, I handled the more technical stuff.

The reason why we wanted to make the Manga Club into an outright club is we figured that other people might've had similar ideas of wanting to create their own stories or their own manga. There's a lot of artists, especially in the IAT (Interactive Arts of Technology) program that are into drawing or story writing. The club supports students who have niche interests and are not as outgoing and sociable.

I didn't think that the club would actually make this far, but it's actually become so important. Students are able to be at a place where they can feel at home. The club was ultimately an excellent idea for us to make because it brought so many people, so many like-minded people together and helped them make friends. Once you're in the later years, like if you're in your first or second year, you might be able to make friends in your classes or just run into them on campus. That's like, really easy. But once you're in third, fourth and fifth year, it becomes way harder to make new friends.

So we realized that places like the Manga Club where it's a small club, everybody knows each other and everyone has a common interest, Manga and anime. Even if they don't write or draw, they at least have that interest. It's super easy to just go in there and start talking about that kind of thing and make friends with almost any of them. I'm really proud of my executives and other senior members for being such friendly, welcoming people. Because of them, the club’s become such a meaningful existence to a lot of people's lives.

Vice President
Student
visibility  66
May 17, 2019