As a member of twenty one societies over my almost four years in soggy St Andrews, there can be only one thing I’m sure of – that they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. When you first arrive, societies look like a neatly-packaged answer to everything – friends, fun, and, if you’re lucky, a future career. They promise community, structure, and identity at a time when most of us are trying to figure out our future selves. But anyone who has stuck it out long enough knows that the reality is a little messier.
These groups are student run, there is no genius “promoter” to manage operations like a football manager in a locker room, pocketing profit and orchestrating strategy. The average society president may be found on the library top floor skimming their assigned readings at last minute, nursing tequila lime sodas during last call at the Central, or convincing themselves that the London Fog their hook-up bought them that morning isn’t worsening their hangover. These people aren’t professional organisers – plain and simple, they’re students.
I urge you not to take this so seriously. Yes, I’ve been a part of twenty one societies (twenty nine if we’re including my time at Cal), but I’ve also been rejected from a considerable amount. I’ve got a scholarship one year, and not the next. I’ve been rejected one year, and accepted the following. I’ve left some clubs out of busyness, but others out of boredom, and some out of bitchiness. These groups label themselves as “organisations” – and some are more than others – but there’s always moments where every single one of these groups are just a form of friendship group. Your “success” in them is about as random as your success in your first-year flat kitchen.
Now, let me be clear – I love societies. Time and time again they’ve given me my closest friends and my most chaotic nights out. I critique and curse because I care. But the creeping “professionalisation” of some clubs has a way of draining joy. Suddenly, joining the Photography Society feels less like picking up a camera and more like applying for an internship at Magnum Photos. Everyone wants leadership positions, everyone wants impact statements, everyone wants a LinkedIn-ready bullet point. Along the way, fun gets demoted.
The trouble comes when students allow clubs to determine their worth. I’ve seen it time and again: friends agonising for days over not getting a role, people spiralling because they weren’t accepted, weeks derailed by one committee’s decision. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t felt it myself. There’s a strange emotional weight societies can carry, especially in a place like St Andrews where our small size means everything feels magnified. It’s a heavy load to pile on a group of students who are still learning how to use a Google calendar.
This is especially exacerbated in a school which already offers a limited range of degrees. You’re not competing with other fashion students for a place on FS, with journalism students for The Saint, or law students for the Law Review. You’re competing with SD and Geography students, Social Anthropologists, Art Historians, Astronomers and Archeologists. You’re also being interviewed by people with (almost guaranteed) no educational experience in the field you’re estimating your entire self-worth upon. They’re teaching things they’ve never been taught.
It’s the same lesson we learn when we realise that our parents are actually not just our parents, but real people too. Our editors, our team leaders, our presidents, are also seeing the society from a new angle, and are not going to be the same flawless CEO of a Big 4 firm might be. An editor once asked me to cite the word “valid” when explaining that someone might view their own opinion as “valid”. Equally, I’ve asked sixty people to sign themselves up for shifts on a google sheet with the settings remaining firmly as “View Only”. We’re all trying our best – most of the time.
I suppose I just have a warning for those in positions of power. If you fall for the siren song of over-professionalisation, there’s only one route it will take. University is not the career industry, penalising students for a five minute late submission is not justified without experience to back it. And until we gain an Art, Music, Law, and a Journalism Degree, I’m not convinced that you would either.
Because that’s what it boils down to: we’re all fumbling. We dress up our fumbling in committee meetings, titles, and carefully worded Instagram captions, but the truth is that most of the time we’re passionately playing pretend. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless – far from it. These societies give us the scaffolding to practice leadership, community, and even failure in ways that our future will be built from. But it also means that when we start treating them as fully-fledged conglomerates, we set ourselves up for disappointment. No matter how many acronyms our committee invents, we’re still students who are, on some level, just trying to keep their flat kitchen bin from overflowing.
And here’s the paradox. Societies matter most when they don’t try to matter too much. The moments people remember years later are not the polished conference panels or the sternly enforced deadlines, but the chaos – the late-night debates in someone’s kitchen, the panicked group chat when half the team forgets to turn up to an event, the laughably last-minute solutions that somehow, against all odds, work. That’s where the joy lies, and that’s where the community is built. Strip that away with over-professionalisation, and all you’re left with is a mediocre imitation of the working world that none of us are quite ready for.
It also explains why rejection from these societies cuts so deeply. On paper, it’s absurd: why should it matter if a twenty-year-old Art Historian tells you that you’re not right for a role in a student organisation that didn’t exist fifteen years ago? And yet it does matter, because societies have become the shorthand currency of success here. In a place as small and self-referential as St Andrews, people notice whether you’re in or out, whether you’ve “made it” into that committee or not. It’s not just a rejection from a club – it can feel like a rejection from the community itself.
So, if there’s a warning you’ll allow me to offer, it’s this: don’t confuse the scaffolding for the building. Societies can be brilliant, energising, and formative, but they are not definitive measures of worth. They’re run by students, for students, in a place where half the charm comes from how imperfect and unserious it all is. Forget that, and the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. And maybe that’s the real takeaway after four years and twenty-one societies: enjoy the mess. Accept the rejection. Laugh at the absurdity of it all. Because if you can’t find humour and perspective in a botched Google Sheet or a committee role that suddenly feels like life or death, you’ll miss the point entirely. Societies are overrated – but in that overratedness, in the contradictions and chaos, they’re also exactly what they need to be.