The status as a registered club guarantees financial support from the school administration, and also a room in a school building for the club. However, for a provisional group, which is a step before gaining recognition as a fully registered group, no financial support is given and the club must share a room with all the other provisional groups.
Being recognized as an official club is not easy. Ewha already has 63 registered clubs and it is short of empty classrooms to give to the newly accepted groups. Thus, the evaluation standards get tougher each semester. Park Jee-min (Korean Literature, 4), the president of the ECU says, "When we accept new clubs as registered groups acknowledged by the school, we make sure that their activities and characteristics as a group do not overlap with those of an already existing club."
Ewha"s 63 clubs each represent different activities. Thus, the founding of a club with a "new" objective is hard to achieve.
About the complaints over the large rate, Park comments, "Many applicants for the admission rush to complete the required papers in just a few moments before the deadline, in which case they omit important information. We place more weight on the continuity of a club"s activity and on their clear goal that involves Ewha students in achieving it."
Eiv had already been recognized as an interim club twice before. However, it always failed in the final evaluation because ECU"s standard of acceptable activity period is over two years. As seen in the case of Eiv, the criteria required of formal clubs are much stricter than those for provisional ones.
UBF, as well, has submitted its application to the ECU for three years. At all times, it was admitted as an interim club, but never as a formal club. "The position that the Union took in declining our application was that there are already too many Christian clubs in Ewha," says Bae Jung-sook (Physics, 4) a member of the UBF. In fact, 15 of the 63 formally admitted clubs at Ewha are Christian groups.
All clubs that try out to gain recognition for the admission as a formal club must pass through two doors that get narrower with each evaluation process. The three groups that were approved as provisional clubs in October face the second screening next semester; two of the clubs have experienced rejections more than twice.
The strict supervision for the ECU in selecting new societies for Ewha is indeed of importance. However, the evaluation standards that the Ewha Club Union puts forth, comes into conflict with their search for "a wide variety of activities involving Ewha students."
neyessioui@ewha.ac.kr