A club prepares curry during one of their meetings. Jake Piper
Elena Storck
Maddie Miller is a sophomore student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who manages to balance four clubs with her schedule as a full-time student, part-time worker, and a busy social life.
Her highest commitment club is Friends of State Street Family homeless outreach, which goes around Madison serving food on the weekends when many other meal services are closed. Maddie spends about three hours each weekend volunteering with them.
Maddie also participates in Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment (PAVE), a student club dedicated to preventing and bringing awareness to sexual assault. She attends this club on a lower commitment level, going to a few meetings a semester.
Additionally, Maddie is a member of two clubs relating to her identity: Students for Social Welfare through her social work major, and the Latine Student Union, a community for Latine students.
Maddie found out about Friends of State Street through her mom, who is also a social worker. The rest of the clubs she found out about through the UW-Madison Student Org Fair. However, finding so many clubs fitting her specific interests was not easy.
“I feel like for kind of niche stuff, when I wanted to do more volunteer work, I found it’s pretty tricky to find on campus,” Maddie said.
Maddie’s experience of having a hard time finding clubs that fit her interests at the org fair is understandable, considering that of the over 1,000 student clubs on the Wisconsin Involvement Network, only 361 clubs were listed in the Spring 2025 Org Fair directory.
“I feel like it’s almost chaotic like going in and like there’s so many people that you can’t actually find out about clubs,” Maddie says, “and I just remember just like randomly signing myself up for stuff And now I have all these emails, I don’t know where half of these emails are coming from.”
But despite her struggles with finding clubs catering to her specific interests, Maddie put in the work to join so many because she finds involvement on campus beneficial.
“You build a stronger community. Like you get to know more people, and it makes a big campus feel smaller.” Maddie said.
ClubCrush, a new app developed at UW-Madison, removes the chaotic, fast-paced, and limited environment of an org fair and allows students to learn more about clubs in a comfortable, pressure-free environment. Through its dating-app style swipe feature, the app can pair users with clubs that match their selected interests, as well as their ideal time-commitment levels.
“It’s like you’re interconnected and you can really work together as people to help uplift people’s successes.” Maddie says, “If you’re struggling on an assignment, you don’t have to struggle alone. You can go to your club.”