Starting an HR Club

When I give tours to prospective students, there is a part where we talk about clubs, and one of the things we say is that since SOM is a relatively small school and since we're such a tight-knit community, it's easy to start a new club. I always believed that, of course. I did not imagine I would ever be starting one, though.

Last week, I was mentioning to someone that I thought it was a shame that SOM doesn't have an HR club. Lord knows we have lots of clubs, including one for just about any business function you can imagine: sales & trading, private equity, healthcare, marketing, education, finance, operations, entrepreneurship, energy, technology, retail, media and entertainment, consulting, arts & culture, biotechnology ... seriously, these are all actual clubs. But not HR.

Regardless of the possibly debatable merits of using an MBA to pursue a career in HR, it was clear anecdotally that some people in our class (maybe me) might be interested in at least learning about what opportunities are out there in this field. But there really hasn't been an obvious sign to this path -- in fact there isn't even a career advisor dedicated to this function. And I haven't seen much of any postings on our job board that are strictly HR.

Anyway, a classmate, Max, overheard me say this and contacted me shortly after by e-mail to say he thought there, too, should be an HR club, and if I'd be willing, he'd like to help me establish one. I did a little asking around and found out that my friend Erika would be interested in not only starting such a club, but co-presiding over it.

So we sent out a spam asking the class who would be interested in being in such a club. I was surprised that 21 people replied with a "yes" ... that's 10% of our class! I was expecting maybe four responses.

Looks like we're moving forward. We had brunch today to go over the forms necessary to apply to start a club, which really aren't that cumbersome. They just want basics, like the club's name, mission, some proposed events and their corresponding budgets, and a couple other things. If this all works out, I suppose I will be co-presiding over two clubs next year. Overcommitted?  Mmmmmmaybe.

In other news, I would like to ask my more religious readers to please pray that I get an internship offer next week. Thanks.