Promoting my Computational Linguistics Club!

Today was club discovery day for the freshmen at my school. I founded a computational linguistics club at my school called "Logic of Language". Catchy, right? I went to school and brought a TV monitor so that the students could see my powerpoint presentation better. I think this was a good idea because if I just presented from my laptop it would be too small. I also printed out 100 flyers to pass out. The turn out for the camp was really good, but not too many students visited my booth initially. In the end, I was able to promote my club pretty well.

The main selling points I pushed for were :

1. Since students need 100 volunteer hours to graduate high school, I told them that for every 1 hour volunteered with the club, they would get 3 hours. Essentially, we would triple their volunteer hours. This was a very compelling point.

2. This is a competition based club where we compete in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad(NACLO) and later on the International Linguistics Olympiad.

The first point was easy to sell, but the second point was a bit more difficult. Linguistics is not a well known subject, and many students(especially freshmen) do not know what it is. I had to explain to them what and how the olympiad would go. I think students are often intimidated by the word "linguistics" or "computational linguistics", so I tried to make it as friendly as possible.

For my second point, I showed sample problems and told them that no prior knowledge is needed. That is really the selling point of the competition. Students can compete without really studying because they are more logic based problems. I also told them that my school would be hosting NACLO 2023. This was something I am really proud of because I had to pull some strings to get my school to host the competition. The school is even on the official website for NACLO!

Overall, club discovery was really fun because there were so many new students. I was able to promote my club and see how other clubs were promoting theirs. I will have another interest meeting for the club when school starts, so stay tuned for another post!