WDIM Club: Calling all “Internet Explorers!” (What it is and why you should care!$$)

Battling with IE is not for the faint of heart.

Some of you may have noted a week or so ago that Dennis was looking for students interested in going to WebVisions at a reduced rate. How can this be accomplished? Easy, the student activity fees we all pay our first term at AI. Turns out the activity fees incoming students pay actually go somewhere, students can request funds for extracurricular projects or for student clubs. So who makes the decisions about who gets the money? We’ll that’s where STAC comes in. STAC receives proposals for funds and decides which groups/clubs/individuals are eligible for money. So how does this relate to WebVisons? Well, in order for the WDIM Department to request funds we need to form a student club for our department, or a “WDIM Club” per se. We already have Nancy Price as the WDIM STAC Representative, so now we just need a WDIM Club President, Treasurer, and to fill out the necessary paperwork to established ourselves as a *real* club.

I admit that student clubs really haven’t been my thing… well ever. In high school I was a loner who spent a lot of time in the darkroom, and at Willamette University I joined a sorority only to drop out several months later. It wasn’t until I started going to Brash Creative meetings a few weeks ago that I realized how much our department could benefit from a club. It was shocking to me how many students take time out of there busy schedules to participate in Brash, it was even more shocking that no WDIM students were members! In my opinion Brash does amazing work, I was also impressed with how organized and dedicated the team is when it comes to meeting with clients and cranking out work. Brash is in desperate need of web designers because basically all of their clients require websites. I was immediately on board and also recruited Michelle Henderson and Brianne Baker along with me.

I have talked with several web students regarding joining Brash but they are not able to attend meetings due to scheduling conflicts. Solution? We form a WDIM Club that meets weekly, we can take on work from Brash and help them out, and we can also accumulate some awesome portfolio pieces in the process. In addition, once we have an active club we can ask STAC for funds to attend WebVisions at a reduced rate. All in all a WDIM Club would be a positive thing, it can get us away from our computers for a bit to wreak havoc and partake in nerd mischief with our own kind. My only request is that the club be named something more funny and original than “WDIM Club.” Michelle and I led a name brainstorming session with some classmates on Thursday and the best one we came up with was “The Internet Explorers” (courtesy of our own Mr. Chappy, actually.) Runners up were “codeNinjas”, “pixelAssasins”, “Web Fusion” and a few others. The name is still in contention but we are open to suggestions… I will be sure to post when the first meeting will be, be sure to be there and be square. ; )

-Allyson