My Dumb (maybe genius) College Club

When I was in college my roommate Joel and I started a club. It’s kind of a funny story.

We’d just gotten back from winter break our sophomore year at the University of Minnesota and we were in the middle of applying for summer internship jobs.

A good summer internship was the holy grail for a college sophomore — it’s like the first thing future employers looked at when you graduate. Neither of us were having any luck finding one because we had no experience to begin with (the great catch-22 of job searching).

I remember feeling pretty discouraged seeing other kids posting on LinkedIn about getting fancy internships at Medtronic or whatever, I was desperate for something to put on my resume. So I booked a meeting with my career counselor, and he suggested I focus on extracurriculars like joining a club or something.

That seemed like a decent idea. Me and Joel browsed the school’s website for clubs to join, but most of them seemed pretty ‘meh’. Nothing that would be strikingly impressive without also being a lot of work… (the irony)

That’s when an even better idea struck: what would look better on a resume than joining a club? founding a club. I forget which of us said it, but remember we looked at each other with the giddy excitement that you only get when you’ve just hatched a diabolically perfect plan.

We’d start our own club.

And if we were going to put “Founder of [Club XYZ]” on our resumes, we might as well come up with the most compelling, sophisticated, impactful-sounding club name possible. Something a future employer simply couldn’t read past.

We decided to found The University of Minnesota Success Club.

In the mind of two 20-year old college students that seemed like the best possible thing you could name a club. A club absolutely destined for greatness. We had done it.

We registered it with the university, recruited a few friends, and decided to start hosting meetings. There was just one problem.. what was The Success Club actually supposed to be about? Up until this point, this was just an irrelevant afterthought.

We decided the obvious answer would be to bring in guest speakers. People who had been ‘successful’ in their careers, we’d invite them in to come talk about how they had managed to climb to the peak of their personal mountain or whatever they wanted to say.

Our first meeting we recruited one of our friends’ former bosses to come and speak. I think he was an financial advisor… I don’t really remember but he spent most of the time schilling retirement plans at his company. Before the meeting we hung up a million flyers around campus promoting free pizza, life advice, and the opportunity to put “Member, University of Minnesota Success Club” on your resume:

Probably 12-13 people showed up. We’d expected like 600 people to show up in our minds, looking back a turnout like that wasn’t so bad.

And in hindsight, I think that’s actually where I learned the most.

Sure, starting a club for the explicit purpose of virtue-signaling to future employers is a pretty hilarious concept. Yet despite our misguided intentions, I ended up learning a lot about the world.

After our first meeting it finally dawned on me that we’d have to take this seriously if we were going to get anyone to show up for a future meeting. So we began putting in some effort.

We recruited a ‘board of directors’, wrote a club charter, hosted fundraisers to cover our pizza budget, and started spending a lot of time/effort recruiting bonafide speakers who’d be worth coming to see.

And believe it or not… it started working.

By Fall semester our Junior year we were landing great speakers. Founders of public companies. Air force pilots. Authors of best-selling books. Even the president of the University of Minnesota himself Eric Kaler:

Through trial and error I learned the art of sending a cold email.

We’d also learned how to promote — we got creative and asked professors of huge intro economics or physics classes (which were like 750 person lectures, the biggest on campus) for 2min at the beginning/end of class to tell students about the club. We set up booths in the quad and at career fairs. We started an email list and sent monthly newsletters.

After a while it started to grow pretty organically. I think by our 5th or 6th meeting we had 50 people in attendance. A few meetings later we ran out of seats in the auditorium; kids were telling their friends.

Ultimately we learned how to lean into what many people actually wanted out of the club. It wasn’t job experience or skill development (there were other clubs for that). It was much simpler: kids wanted a club with low effort, a free hot meal, a little bit of life advice, and something they could put on their resume. Being authentic about this helped, we learned to ~understand~ our customer.

The club ended up running for 2.5 years until spring semester senior year when COVID hit. Towards the end I’d recruited a few underclassmen to run it once I graduated, no clue if it still exists or not (if not and you’re a UMN student reading this, here’s your chance!)

Looking back I think it was really the perfect learning experience.

I learned a lot about how to organize a group of people. How to do sales and cold outreach. How to do marketing and promotion. How to raise a little bit of money. How to persist. And how to not take myself too seriously.

Most of that learning has translated extremely well to running a startup — I do a lot of the same things now on a daily basis, just at a larger scale with higher stakes.

So at the end of the day… was it worth it? Yes.

Was it the best possible club to start? Maybe not.

Did it actually help me land a job out of college? No chance.

Looking back that was probably for the best too, I wouldn’t be where I am otherwise :-)

Cheers,
Ramsey