by Delaney Letts
CMU recently welcomed a new club to the campus this Fall: Sticker Club. This club “encourages artistic expression and admiration through collecting, trading and making stickers,” as their online description reads. As of now, this club meets every other Tuesday night at 7 p.m. in the Outdoor Program lounge
Club founder and sophomore IvAnn Garcia-Dickerson explains the story behind creating this club.
“I have always had a lot of stickers,” Garcia-Dickerson said. “ […] Freshman year, my friends and I would trade stickers for fun and get really excited about it. So, one day I decided it would be cool to form a club for such an activity and eventually make some money from it.”
Garcia-Dickerson described this club as “a whole bunch of goons, yet a pretty diverse group. We’ve created a really awesome atmosphere.”
A typical meeting involves taking care of business orders, but more importantly sharing stickers with the group—telling stories behind each one as to where it came from and why it’s special—and then trading stickers within the giant circle or providing a new sticker for everyone to take home.
All and any stickers are accepted. A variety of diverse stickers have already made an appearance from Patagonia stickers to Colorado stickers to Olive Garden-Tonya Tomato stickers.
“We all love stickers,” member Connor Bell said. “We always found ourselves trading stickers even before the first meeting here in the outdoor program. I don’t always have the control to keep them all for trading, though.”
“Many of the members of the Sticker Club are people who are really passionate about adventure, and as we go places throughout the world, we get stickers to remember our experiences,” member Jeremy Weiner said. “So at club meetings, we can then sit down, trade stickers, trade memories, share stories, and then we sometimes stick our stickers on things.”
Members decorate many personal belongings including water bottles, coolers, helmets, snowboards, rafts, cars, and more. “I never considered that other people would have folders full of stickers. I showed up, and there was about 35 people who all had a ton of these stickers. I thought, ‘I’m not alone—these are my people.’”
In the future, Sticker Club plans to purchase a sticker printer and sell custom stickers for different clubs and organizations around campus. They also have a big dream in creating a sticker mural outside of Dominguez Hall’s main doors. The idea would be that any student could add a sticker that they have collected to the wall at any time.
“The sticker mural would be a big symbol of pride for all CMU students. It could even be the biggest on campus participation student life has seen in awhile,” Garcia- Dickerson said.
