When Culture Becomes Competitive
If the point is belonging, why is it so hard to get in?
For freshmen first arriving at Columbia, an infinite number of opportunities for academic excellence, professional exploration, and a vibrant social life seem available. Yet, that shiny optimism is quickly overshadowed by a cumbersome club application process eerily reminiscent of the dreaded college application season students naively believed they had left behind.
Coffee chats, group interviews, mixers, resumes, technical questions, and essay responses are common barriers to entry before one can enter the golden social circle of a club managed by other students. For some student organizations, this exclusivity is perfunctory: pre-professional organizations often require knowledge and commitment filters, while competition-based groups favor members with prior experience or demonstrated talent. That logic, however, becomes less straightforward when such structures appear in cultural clubs that are centered around identity and belonging rather than performance. For clubs that market themselves as sites of community, what is the point of exclusivity?
Behind The Scenes
While not every cultural organization on campus is exclusive, groups that serve well-represented ethnic populations at Columbia often are. Notoriously competitive cultural clubs include Columbia’s Chinese Students Club (CSC), Korean Student Association (KSA), and Club Zamana. While each hosts large-scale cultural showcases, community programming, and outreach initiatives open to everyone, they also operate under hierarchical, multi-tiered membership systems that, either intentionally or unintentionally, determine the level of social engagement one receives from joining the club. These tiers consist of the General Body membership (G-Body), Board, and Executive Board (E-Board).
To access structured bonding activities, restaurant outings, and even weekly meetings, applicants have to join the Board as an Organizational Committee Member (OCM) or as a “Freshman/Transfer Representative.” Other examples of Board-exclusive features I learned about through conversations with club leaders include Club Zamana’s mandated chai chats with the E-Board, CSC’s big-little program, KSA’s private spring retreat, and the general pregames or afterparties that surround larger events.
If you are otherwise part of the G-Body, you receive little opportunity to engage with cultural or social activities outside of the club’s main events and smaller, often less well-organized activities. This results in the troubling sentiment that those who are not part of the Board are not true members of the club. To be in the G-Body is essentially a nominal title applied to anyone who shows up to the club’s public events; in other words, being part of the G-Body means you gain nothing more from the club than the average Columbia student.
However, entering the Board requires applicants to go through a lengthy process. Ostensibly, the first step is the written application, consisting of standard questions about cultural identity, motivation, and availability. For example, KSA’s application inquires about “an aspect of Korea that most interests you,” while CSC’s simply asks “Why do you want to join CSC?” The next step is a required 10-20 minute interview to further gauge applicants’ interest and expected contributions. These are normal questions to ask, but behind the scenes, an opaque decision-making process determines who advances to the next stage of the process: a second, more in-depth round of interviews. Based on my own experience applying to CSC, this round often involves case studies of how one reacts in certain situations, proposals for events, and more personality-based questions. In the end, only a select few are accepted for the Board. At CSC, for example, only 14 of the roughly 100 applicants were eventually accepted, according to club president Amy Lu CC ‘27.
Why is the application process to join a social or cultural club so protracted? It seems ironic that a place meant for people to find their community at college is simultaneously exclusionary.
Though I have gone through the recruitment process and am currently serving as a committee member for CSC, I often ask myself why our club even needs this filtering mechanism. While my time at CSC has been fantastic—expanding my social circle, introducing me to many new experiences, and helping ease the transition into college life—I fail to understand why more people cannot also reap the same benefits from the club. Greater inclusion would not only allow us to muster more support for our events, but it would also cultivate a more vibrant and diverse social community.
Essential or Elitist?
Three themes emerged consistently across interviews with members of CSC, KSA, and Club Zamana in defense of their selective application processes: commitment, community, and a seemingly mutual sense of resignation to the way their club currently operates. The application process, they argued, is meant to identify students who are genuinely interested in contributing to the club’s mission rather than simply adding another line to their resume.
I, however, fail to see how this approach properly screens for anything. Among the throngs of eager applicants, how many can explicitly voice anything novel enough to differentiate their application from the rest? How many possible answers to “Why do you want to join CSC?” can there be? How many unique event ideas can one propose for a cultural club?
Moreover, it seems dubious to claim that one can ascertain another’s year-long commitment to a club from a series of one-off answers that, quite honestly, can be constructed in a few minutes with little effort. Though I agree that it can be easy to identify some applicants’ shallow careerist motives, I doubt that a process that turns away most interested students can realistically attribute that reason for most of its rejections.
Even amongst those who view the process as a commitment filter, there is recognition that it is imperfect. Karthik Mahakala CC ‘29, a spring organizational committee member within Club Zamana, highlighted that the interview is “just a 15-minute time slot. How can they truly get to know you as a person?”
I inquired of Irene Seuk CC ‘28, a programming officer for KSA, for her honest opinion. “How do you discern whether someone deserves to be on the board of a cultural club?” she asked. “It’s clearly not about how Korean you are because technically we are all Korean…if you show interest in joining the club, that, in itself, is you showing your commitment to being a member of the club.”
Despite these acknowledgements, there has been little change to address the accessibility issue within these clubs. While CSC President Lu and Executive Committee Member (ECM) Jerry Zheng SEAS ‘28 mentioned a desire to host more G-Body events, revive a social connection program (“Connect Pods”), and select for students who are not already in a cultural community on campus, there was no mention of removing the barrier that necessitates all these proposed solutions.
When asked what changes they would make to the current process, nobody suggested anything that would fundamentally change the exclusive nature of the clubs. Some voiced a sense of helplessness, stating that they couldn’t “think of a better system,” while others simply accepted it as a relic of the past long before their time.
To me, this is depressing: We are students at one of the best universities in the world, and yet, we cannot figure out a better way to make our cultural communities more accessible to students who are merely looking to belong. Why is that?
A Symptom of Columbia’s Culture?
Columbia’s broader campus culture increasingly normalizes competition as a marker of legitimacy. Finance clubs, student publications, and even volunteer organizations rely on multi-stage recruitment processes that mirror professional hiring.
Within this environment, it appears as if cultural spaces have adopted the same logic. Prestige culture has seeped into areas that should be defined by openness, limiting the benefits of a community to a small group of people who can successfully jump through the hoops assigned to them. Purposefully or not, these identity-based clubs have become both participants and perpetrators of a different type of culture on campus than originally intended.
If the goal is to truly foster community rather than exclusivity, then the organizational model itself deserves reconsideration.
One possibility would be a more clearly defined general body structure. Instead of filtering students into the board through interviews, membership could remain broadly open while leadership positions remain selective. Students who attend a minimum number of events could gain voting rights within the club, allowing them to participate in electing leadership or approving major programming initiatives. In practice, this would resemble the way many traditional student governments or large campus organizations operate: broad participation at the base level, with elected leadership responsible for coordination and logistics.
Another possibility involves rethinking internal community building. Many current bonding initiatives exist primarily within the board and the executive board. The big-little system, mandated chai/coffee chats, and internal mixers with the leadership of other clubs create tight-knit networks that are largely inaccessible to the general body. Expanding versions of these programs to include interested general body members could significantly narrow the divide between the experiences of those on Board and those in the G-Body.
Of course, practical constraints complicate these proposals. These organizations operate with limited funding and face difficulties in managing the scale of their existing events. Expanding programming or opening participation more broadly would require additional logistical coordination and financial resources.
Yet, workarounds are possible. Smaller, lower-cost gatherings such as discussion nights, cultural workshops, or rotating host dinners could distribute responsibility among volunteers rather than concentrating it entirely within a small leadership team. Even informal mentorship structures between board members and general attendees could help recreate the same sense of connection that currently only exists within internal committees.
None of these alternatives is a perfect solution, but they point to a broader principle: If cultural organizations exist to build community, then access to that community cannot remain tightly controlled by processes designed to select a small internal leadership circle. Hierarchy may be important for an organization, but it does not necessitate a restrictive barrier to entry that turns away most interested people from experiencing a cultural community. If anything, these clubs should be a sanctuary from the pervasive prestige culture that haunts Columbia’s other clubs.
Mr. Chang is a freshman at Columbia College studying political science and computer science. He is a staff editor for Sundial.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.
 | A guest post by
|
Very thought-provoking and well-written. If you'll permit me a very crude bifurcation of the topic, I'm curious about the balance in participation between clubs based on interests vs identity--if you know. It seems to me the healthiest campus cultures would have more participation in the former. That might be a sign that increasing numbers of students don't see their ethnic/religious/gender identity as their most defining feature.