For Desiree Matthews, joining clubs has been an essential part of the transition to Temple. As a member of five organizations, including Black Girls Vote and the Owls Track Club, she found clubs to be a space for meeting a diverse range of students. But, she admitted it was a little nerve-wracking at first to join clubs alone.

“I was nervous in the sense that my friends and roommates don’t have the same interests as me, so a lot of the clubs I ended up looking for on my own,” said Matthews, a freshman political science major. “A whole bunch of them [are] made up of a lot of juniors, so being one of the only freshmen I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m just new to all of this,’ but I think that’s what makes it fun.”

Just 29% of students say they have met most of their friends through clubs, according to a recent survey conducted by The Temple News from Feb. 5 to Feb. 24 with more than 150 student responses.

Temple students often find clubs to be the best way to meet new people, but many face barriers that prevent them from fully engaging. 

While student organizations offer social opportunities, roughly 36% of students cite busy schedules as a barrier, and almost 28% find inconvenient meeting times to be a deterrent, TTN’s poll found. Additionally, some feel excluded due to cliques or worry about membership dues. 

Not all students face these challenges — approximately 11% reported no barriers to joining clubs. However, many student leaders are taking action to make organizations more accessible and inclusive for everyone.

Despite being an active member of five different organizations, Matthews also found it difficult to stay engaged. 

“A huge barrier is that all the clubs run at the same day and time, it’s from six to seven [p.m.,]” Matthews said. “I don’t understand what it is, it seems to be the sweet spot.”

For commuter students, evening meeting times can be a barrier in a different way.

“Commuters can’t really stay that long, since the area does get sketchy the more dark it is outside,” wrote an anonymous survey respondent. “Also, jobs are also after school, so it sorta clashes. Clubs are a nice way to meet friends, but it’s really only beneficial to students who live nearby or are on campus.”

Some commuters, like Danny Nguyen, stack their classes on certain days of the week to avoid excessive travel. He takes five classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, making it difficult to attend Fox Student Professional Organizations during their Monday, Wednesday, Friday scheduled meetings, when he doesn’t typically make the trip to campus.

More than 69% of students are commuters who do not walk to campus, according to a 2022 survey by Temple’s Office of Sustainability. Nugyen believes that despite this large percentage, not enough is being done to help commuters feel represented and integrated into campus life.

Nguyen has found it challenging to feel a sense of community on campus. To help foster connections among commuters, he has been active in the Commuters Club GroupMe, created in January. In just two weeks from the launch, more than 80 students joined. Like Nguyen, some commuter students have found it easier to make friends online than in person.

“I think a lot of people feel super disconnected to Temple, like it’s just a place that you go to school,” said Nguyen, a junior supply chain management major and treasurer of Temple Commuters Club. “Even in a lot of my classes, just talking to people who are next to me, literally their mindset is, ‘I just show up.’”

Survey comments from anonymous students further highlighted a lack of community on campus.

“Temple is focused on the individual,” wrote an anonymous survey respondent. “Making friendships and developing relationships is painfully difficult.”

But despite those views, just 22% of surveyed students said they don’t feel a strong support system at Temple. However, 60% believe that they do have a strong support system and 15% were unsure.

Some students, like Maggie Sullivan, are working to foster a stronger sense of community on campus.

As a freshman, Sullivan loved lifting weights but found it daunting to go to the gym alone, where men dominated the weight room and she didn’t know anyone. Her experience sparked an idea to build her own community.

In the following semester, Sullivan founded Temple’s chapter of Girl Gains, a national organization that empowers women within the gym.

“I didn’t really have a lot of girl friends at the gym, and I wanted more girl friends at the gym, so I thought, selfishly, I would make more friends at the gym this way,” said Sullivan, a senior tourism and hospitality management major.

She credited the club’s early success to the initial Girl Gains executive board, who spread the word to their friends.

“It is hard to keep people engaged, especially when just people really want to lift [at STAR Gym], it’s hard to get gym space, it’s hard to coordinate events — and eventually we got the Ladies Lifts,” Sullivan said. 

Once a month on a Saturday, before STAR Gym opens, Girl Gains hosts ‘Ladies Lifts,’ a women’s-only gym session. It took two years of negotiations with Campus Recreation to get approval. Sullivan believes the success of the occasional event can spark more engagement with students if Girl Gains has access to providing similar events.

About 20 to 50 girls attend Girl Gains meetings and the club has built a following of nearly 1,000 on Instagram. It has also earned two STARS in Temple Student Government’s STAR program, which allocates funding to university clubs based on their ranking.

In January 2025, TSG announced that two STAR clubs would receive less funding in the Fall 2025 semester, a drop from $2500 to $1000, The Temple News reported. 

“It’s hard to get the funding, and we rely a lot on our membership dues, even though they’re not mandatory,” Sullivan said. “It’s hard to balance that, because we want everybody to feel welcome, but we also want the money to put on cool events, because it is more engaging.” 

For now, Girl Gains fundraises for their costs by selling protein-baked goods outside STAR Gym.  

Like Sullivan, Salma Abounasra, a junior management information systems major, felt lost when she arrived at Temple as a freshman. She struggled to find friends that shared her Arab identity until she met Zena Ibrahim, a sophomore health professions major. Together they traveled to Arab Societies at Drexel and Jefferson.

“We would go to the fairs [at Temple], and there was literally nothing that represented Arab students,” Abounasra said. “So we were like, we need to create something to have people form friendships like our friendship and just have other Arabs meet each other.”

During the Fall 2024 semester, Abounasra and Ibrahim founded Temple Arab Society, a non-religious club open to students from all backgrounds, including those who are not Arab and wish to learn more about the culture. Since then, they have hosted Arabian tea nights and game nights.

Their goal was to create a safe space for Arab students to connect, and during their first meeting, they felt they achieved just that.

“We didn’t want people coming in and just sticking to their friend group, only sitting with their friends,” Abounasra said. “The games from the first event made everyone comfortable, just like talking, laughing. By the end of it, everybody was just going up to everyone, it was really nice.”

One survey respondent mentioned Temple Arab Society as a place they made more friends.

As a commuter student, Ibrahim said considering everyone’s schedules, especially other commuters, has been key to their success.

“I had a bunch of questions when I came to Temple that I couldn’t really get answered because no one was there to answer for me,” said Cindy Sako, president of Temple Commuter Club and a senior health professions major. “So it can’t just be other Temple clubs helping us integrate, but just the system in general needs to provide different levels and different ways for people to get involved, and we’re hoping to be just one of them.”

While Commuter Club has hosted events, Sako argues that Temple Student Government or the administration can take on this issue more effectively. She believes that initiative can be taken during freshman orientation, curating an event specifically for new commuter students to meet each other.

Sako believes that while there should be better integration methods, commuters must push themselves to cultivate new friendships.

“Just start early, because I started way too late in my senior year, trying to make an effort to join things,” Sako said. “It seems scary and it seems hard, but once I did it, I was like, dang, I wish I started earlier because I found my way to work around the commute, and it’s hard, but it’s definitely well worth it, and it helps you feel more connected.”

Approximately 62% of surveyed students believe that it takes effort to meet new people on campus. 

As a freshman, Matthews believes that students must step out of their comfort zone and join clubs in order to find the meaningful experience Temple has to offer.

“Just get out there, have fun,” Matthews said. “You’re paying for [the college experience], so you might as well use it.”