Life and culture: Clubs & activities

MIT students organize more than 450 official student groups, or about 1 for every 10 undergraduates. If you don’t find an existing club or organization to match your interests, it’s easy to start your own, and get together with your friends to nerd out however your heart desires.

The recognized student groups at MIT include ethnic and cultural associations, musical, theater, and dance groups, religious organizations, activism groups, and many more including a newspaper, a debate team, a radio station, student government, and so on.

But alongside these conventional activities, we also host some fairly unconventional clubs, too, including:

• Laboratory for Chocolate Science, a club dedicated to the cultural appreciation and scientific investigation of chocolate, and the only group on campus that orders more than 500 pounds of chocolate a year
• Science Fiction Society, home to the largest open-stacks library of science fiction and fantasy books in the world
• Spinning Arts Club, which provides a venue in which to learn and practice (safe) LED prop and fire spinning
• Puppy Lab, which deploys the scientifically-proven stress-relieving effects of animal interaction to improve the state of community mental health and wellness
• Outing Club, which is dedicated to helping the MIT and Cambridge community enjoy the great outdoors, and owns cabins in New Hampshire with names like Camelot and Intervale

MIT clubs are officially organized through, and recognized by, the Association of Student Activities (ASA), a student-run joint committee⁠01 If you join the UA and then administer the ASA, you'll be a member of the club that recognizes clubs, <em>including itself</em>, which is pretty meta. of both the Undergraduate Association (UA) and the Graduate Student Council (GSC). The student leadership of the ASA helps allocate space and funding to student groups to better pursue their interests.