Amit Mehta

08/08/15

It was time for a reboot

It was time for a reboot. We’ve been trying really hard to define ourselves as a group over the past year. We spent so much time asking ourselves what we would do that we completely forgot why we were doing it. Maybe we were too ambitious, or maybe we weren’t ambitious enough; either way, we knew that our club needed a reboot.

So we did just that: we started fresh, rebuilding the club from the ground up but making sure to keep our purpose in mind along the way. By learning from our experience last term we’ve managed not only to improve on the activities we hosted, but to offer even more interesting opportunities to members. The club has streamlined its operations to focus on three exclusive types of events, which you should definitely check out in our what we do section.

Everything we do will be hands-on, and each club meeting will offer you another opportunity to try something new. By becoming a reboot member, you’re joining a community where students learn from each other. Together, we share our ideas, our skills, and our experiences to push the limits of creativity.

Since this is a place for you to become inspired from each other’s ideas, we thought it would be great to find a way to keep the conversation going outside of meetings. The executive team has been using Slack for the past few months and it works really well; we would love to invite all of our members to join us on Slack to stay in the loop.

Along with the redesign of our club operations also came a redesign of what the club looks like. A huge shout out goes to our VP of Marketing, Emily, for dreaming up our new logo. Every colour in that logo represent a faculty at the University of Waterloo, and together, they look damn good. The website has been completely rebuilt from scratch as well, thanks to a lot of effort from our VP of Software, Theeran, and a bunch of help from Emily too. Believe me when I say that these two put ridiculous amounts of time into making this site what it is now. And, of course, our dedicated VP of Logistics Tom cannot be forgotten for all the time he’s put into pulling this club together from behind the scenes. Although he spends most of his day waiting for replies, every email he sends to a possible mentor, community partner, or professor goes out with a painstaking amount of detail in it. Special thanks also go out to our former VP of Marketing, Suhash, for his pictures on our home page, and to Ahmad Hussein, a very involved reboot member who jumped in to help bring the website together at the last minute.

We’ve put hundreds of hours into this club over the summer. And at this point that might seem a little crazy. Why have we been so invested in this? Isn’t it just a university club?

Sure, it’s a university club; but it’s also so much bigger than that. We’re not only doing this to provide students with a place to go to make their ideas come to life. It’s not just about offering members a chance to step out of their comfort zone, or to network with others in a unique, hands-on setting.

This is about fostering a new mindset at the University of Waterloo. We’re working to finally unite students from every faculty by giving them hands-on opportunities to collaborate and share their skills. It’s so much bigger than just a club; it’s the community that we need to prove that innovation and creativity go hand-in-hand. We’re taking on the task of giving every student a chance to express themselves in a place where everyone is ready to learn from what you can do. Our creative projects encourage members to rely on each other in an environment where it’s totally okay if your idea doesn’t work out, as long as you learned something along the way. This is about discovering something new from another student’s perspective, and giving them the opportunity to do the same.

So, why does reboot exist? Why do we dedicate so much of our time to making this work?
Because this is what we’re passionate about.
And we’re offering you an opportunity to find your passion too.

This is your chance to become a part of the first club at UWaterloo to bring students together through collaborative and hands-on cross-faculty projects. Come and check us out. We’re taking a step towards a new mindset; take it with us.

Join the movement.
reboot the culture of creation