Why is the pool empty on such a beautiful and sunny summer day? It's because it's September. It's time to close the pools and open the schools. Back to school season brings anxiety and excitement for students everywhere. Perhaps none more so than those attending their first year of university. For many of them, it is the first time in their entire lives that they are living away from home. Every single person that is nearby, including their roommate, is a complete and total stranger.
Choosing a University
Obviously college is not for everyone, but it was definitely for me. Ever since I saw the Apple //e in the kindergarten classroom, I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life playing with computers every chance I got. And so far I have been successful. That is my life, playing with computers almost every waking moment.
When it came time to go to college, academically all I really cared about was do they have a computer science degree? If they had the computer science program, good enough. I don't care about any of the academic stuff going on. And so I went to tour all these schools, and they all tried to convince me to spend my tuition money there. They kept showing me things that I didn't really care too much about. Laboratories, dormitories, food service, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and athletic facilities, all kinds of things to try to convince me that this was a cool place to to come to live and study. None of them really put in a lot of effort to answer the real question, which is, am I going to find my people there?
I grew up in a suburb, and there weren't very many nerdy people. I knew more about computers, anime, and video games than most people in the town, including the adults. I had a taste of what it was like to live among nerds when I went to nerdy summer camp for a few weeks. I went twice for four weeks each time. And at that nerdy summer camp, in just those few weeks, I learned C. I learned HTML. I learned Pascal. I learned about Linux. I learned how to play Dungeons and Dragons. I met people who played Magic: The Gathering and BattleTech. That was the life, that was the nerdy life. And so these schools did not do anything to let me know the nerdy people are there.
What exactly can a college or university do to help students find their people when they're attending? There's a chance, though it's unlikely, that your randomly assigned freshman year roommate will become your BFF. It's happened before. You might find friends in class, though that's a bit awkward since class is not usually a time for socializing. Fraternities and sororities are the traditional solution to this problem, though the downsides of those organizations are well known. I hope I don't need to explain them to anybody. There are athletic activities, but those aren't for everybody. There are religious organizations, and those are not for everybody. The best solution to this problem are the clubs, the student organizations.
I attended the Rochester Institute of Technology because in some of the literature they sent me, there was a random sheet of paper that looked like they included it because they had to. They didn't seem to care. It was a list of student organizations in small font. No descriptions, no details, just the titles. And on that list I could tell, based on the fact that those organizations existed at the school, that the student body was nerdy as heck. It didn't matter if I didn't end up joining any of those clubs, or whether they had big attendance, or whether they really existed. The fact that they were on that list let me know the student body was full of nerds.
The Clubs Deliver
So I go to it and I join these clubs and they deliver. I made some friends at the gaming club and a few other clubs, but the one that had the biggest impact on my life by far was the anime club. The anime club was big. They had a lot of members, hundreds, and they would meet and do various activities multiple times per week. For the entire five years that I was at this school, I must have gone to over 200 plus anime club events of one kind or another. I spent more time with the anime club than in any other activity or academic pursuit, and I learned more from the anime club that I learned from anything and the entire academic program.
I learned, of course, about anime and manga. Before I had gone to this school all I knew about were what was on Toonami and Sci-Fi Channel and available on VHS at my local store. I learned about event management. Even though I wasn't formally on the board of the club. I was very close with them and heavily involved in the activities going on there.
I learned about the convention scene. I had never been to a convention. I didn't really fully understand what conventions were all about. Thanks to the anime club, I started going and I still go to nerdy conventions today. I speak at nerdy conventions on panels to this day. That was something I only started doing thanks to the anime club. The very first panel we ever did at a convention was an Anime Club Summit.
Of course, I've gotten a lot of networking opportunities from the anime club, not just people who were in the club with me. People who were in the club before and after I graduated. I have a connection to them if I meet them somewhere.
By far the greatest thing that I have received from the anime club is the fact that 20 plus years after graduating college, the most of my closest friends are people who were directly or indirectly related to that club. Our website is frontrowcrew.com. It's called frontrowcrew.com because we are the people who sat in the front row of the anime club.
Membership Cards
Anime club was such a big part of my life that after all these years, I have still saved my anime club membership cards. I only have three out of the five because in my second year of school, we were playing Dance Dance Revolution at a local arcade with friends from the anime club, and I left my wallet behind on the side of the DDR cabinet, losing my first two cards, but I still have the last three.
Every year we would have a choice of a few different membership cards available with different anime on them. In my third year of school, I chose this card which has art from an anime called RahXephon. This is a good lesson to learn in that this show was hot for five minutes, and those five minutes just happened to include the minute that I was choosing which card to get that year. This show was not very good. It's not remembered by anyone, but it was a mecha show and it was the show that I was watching at that time, and I ended up making that selection poorly.
In my second to last year, I made this choice, Lupin III. Something I had never seen before, and didn't know about at all. I have to thank the anime club for introducing me to what I think is something almost everyone in Japan has heard of, and people in the US probably still don't know about, but is a really big deal. Lupin is one of those things that I don't think is anyone's favorite anime, but almost everyone loves it. I've never met a Lupin hater, and so everyone's always, you know, going to Lupin now and again.
And in my final year I chose this. Initial D. Ah, good old Initial D. We showed this at the anime club and we laughed at how silly it was, even though we liked the Super Eurobeat music. But a week later we were marathoning the whole show in a college lecture hall. However silly and bad that show is, there was something to it. It stayed with me for quite a few years.
My good friend, who was a former anime club president, dug into their archives and pulled out some treasure for me for this video. These are the anime club membership cards from the year 1999–2000, when I was still in high school.
Before we go through the cards, I just want to point out in the top left we have the anime club mascot, which is a chibi drawing of Great Mazinger. You'll see this was the same image on my anime club t-shirt. On the back of that t-shirt is the anime club slogan, which is “We are the no-brand heroes.” That slogan comes from a manga/anime called Here Is Greenwood, which is about a crazy dormitory. That is why it is so appropriate for a college anime club.
Looking through these cards, these membership cards, we're going to be able to see what the most serious and intense otaku in the United States in the year 1999, what anime they thought were significant, important, popular. First, we're starting off here with Slayers. We got Magic Knight Rayearth.
We have Princess Mononoke. This is really interesting that this is here because this movie came out in 1997, and it was not in theaters in the United States until September of 1999. But they had these cards printed in September of 1999. So these guys, they must have seen a fan-sub. They were on top of it. Nothing was escaping them.
Then we have Oh, My Goddess!, which I think is forgotten by a lot of people. We have Vision of Escaflowne, which was popular with us as well. Martian Successor Nadesico, which is, I think, mostly forgotten. Ranma 1/2 is the opposite of completely forgotten. This is still a huge deal.
This is called You're Under Arrest. It's wild, but I remember all these anime. Even though I haven't even seen them all. I never watched You’re Under Arrest, even though everyone else was was into it. I remember people had wall scrolls of this hanging in their dorm rooms.
Of course, Evangelion was hot and Sailor Moon was hot. I guess they needed something if there were more casual new students coming in. They wanted to have something that they would recognize that they could choose for their membership card.
Flyers
Something else my friend dug out of the archives were some flyers. I can't go through all of them because there's too many. Two of them are really important. These flyers, we would hang these up around the school every single week. Telling people what we were showing when we were showing it, what time to come, etc. And basically every time we printed a new flyer, we would go up, take the old ones down, put the new ones up. There was at any day, no matter what day it was, there was basically always anime club flyers up around the school at all times. Every single person on campus, unless they couldn't read, rr they were just staying in their dorm room, knew when the next anime club event was and what it was.
Here is the flyer for the Initial D marathon that I mentioned. I spent December 15th and 16th of that year in that room from noon to six. Two days in a row, watching all of Initial D. We watched 13 episodes one day, and we watched 13 episodes the next day.
The other flyer I want to show you is this one. This is the flyer from the very first anime club meeting I ever went to, period, on September 7th in the year 2000. This doesn't have a time on it, but I knew what time to show up. I showed up on time. The room was full. There were at least 6–7 people in that room that I still know today. That was the first time that I was in the same room as those people. On Thursday, September 7th in the year 2000.
At this showing, they showed a bunch of anime music videos. I don't remember which ones. But I had never seen anything like that before. It was a new concept to me. And then they showed the first episode of the Lodoss War OAV and the first episode of The Gunsmith Cats OAV. I had heard of Lodoss War, but I had never seen it. I'd never heard of Gunsmith Cats, and I had never heard of Cowboy Bebop. They showed the fifth episode of Cowboy Bebop, which I think was the correct choice. They were trying to be impressive. The first episode would have worked also, but, the fifth episode is really something special. That shows you the kind of thinking that was going into the anime club planning.
Pretty awesome stuff from the archives.
Respect School Clubs
Schools do not prioritize student organizations nearly enough. Fraternities and sororities get real estate. Sports teams get millions of dollars, stadiums, all kinds of stuff. Despite the benefits for recruitment, retention, and education; despite running a convention every single year that brings in thousands of attendees; something like the anime club has its resources slashed. It just doesn't make sense.
I think part of it is that our society just doesn't seem to prioritize these clubs either. Funnily enough, if you watch anime and read manga, you'll see plenty of storylines about college and high school clubs. Not so much in the English speaking media. It's quite rare. I don't think I'll be changing society with this little video, but I hope that somebody out there joins a club, and has it impact their life just as much as the RIT Anime Club impacted mine.