Founding the Xingyun Poetry Club at USTC
Published:
The USTC Student Club Association recorded the founding of the Xingyun Poetry Club, which I helped start. The club created a home for poetry readings, writing, and student-run cultural events; its activities and posts later reached more than 100,000 views across platforms.
Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01
How it started
I helped found the club in November 2020, during my first semester at USTC, and served as its founding president until June 2022. USTC is a science and engineering university, and at the time it had no poetry club at all. Xingyun became the first.
The founding post from the Student Club Association marks the day the club became official. What it cannot show is how much paperwork came before that day: a charter, a membership plan, an activity plan, a name. A group of students who wanted to read poems together had to learn, very quickly, how to run a small organization.
What we built
Over the next year and a half the club ran poetry readings, writing workshops, and student-run cultural events, and published members’ work on its accounts. By the time I handed it over, membership had grown past 1,300 students, and the club’s activities and posts had reached more than 100,000 views across platforms.
The tools I did not expect to learn
Running the club’s writing turned into something larger than I planned. I wrote a separate post about it: the poetry club is where I first used Markdown and first learned Git. We needed one place for the charter and the poems, and we were tired of files named “final version 2” and “final version 3.” Version control solved a very human problem for us, long before I used it for code.
The people mattered even more than the tools. Looking back at the founding members, you could almost count two unicorns among them.
What I took from it
Founding the club taught me three things I still use.
- An empty niche is an opportunity. A science university with no poetry club does not mean nobody wanted one. It meant nobody had done the paperwork.
- Structure frees people. A clear charter and a regular schedule made it easier for members to show up and contribute, not harder.
- Founding is not the hard part. Keeping something alive after the first wave of excitement is. Handing it to the next group of students, in working order, was the real test.
A club is a startup with no revenue: what keeps it alive is people who want to come back next week.
Read the club association post.
