Students flooded the club fair last Thursday, exploring hundreds of student groups in the hopes of finding a place to belong at Brown. While many clubs are specifically geared toward Brown undergraduates, others are open to the broader Brown and RISD communities.
The Herald spoke to three graduate students about what attracted them to undergraduate groups on campus.
Although Milidu Jayaweera ’26 MD’30 is currently a medical school student, he said he had a broader awareness of clubs than his peers because he spent his undergraduate years at Brown. Jayaweera joined the Brown Ballroom Dance Team during his senior year, and has continued dancing through medical school.
“Since the community is so tight-knit, it makes it very easy for that transition to happen between undergrad to grad or med if you stay at Brown,” he said. “I think ballroom does a good job of kind of being open to anyone,” he said, adding that the club is open to Rhode Islanders not affiliated with the University.
The team holds weekly open classes and provides competition opportunities for its members.
Jayaweera said that while some medical school clubs are “recreational,” most are “a little bit more specific to medicine” and tend to be “more career-oriented.”
But some career-oriented undergraduate clubs also appeal to graduate students.
When Audrey Smith GS came to Brown from the University of Maine in 2023, the School of Engineering launched the Initiative for Sustainable Energy. She noticed that the initiative was “very faculty oriented,” so in March 2025, she launched the student chapter of the program.
Since then, she’s worked to make the club “more official,” spearheading efforts to start the club registration process with the Student Activities Office.
“I have two more years left, and so I hope to give it enough legs and let it carry itself after I graduate,” Smith said. “I would like to see this get more traction with undergrads,” she said.
Smith is not a member of any graduate clubs. “The clubs that I would be interested in and are aware of are probably undergrad,” Smith said. “I haven’t found a groove within the grad school clubs, and they’re not advertised to us as much as the undergrad SAO clubs.”
Gabby Litterio GS joined What’s On Tap? — the University’s tap dance-focused group — during the first year of their PhD program. Littero danced growing up and said they were “really excited to find out that Brown University had a club specifically for that.”
Litterio decided that they would join WOT, an undergraduate club, because “the infrastructure already sort of existed” and the graduate dance clubs that do exist are “not very focused” on specific genres.
Litterio also said that, as a graduate student, they were able to fill a mentorship role for undergraduates in the club. They served as a co-director of the group for several years, and still assist with administrative tasks.
“It is very, very clear I come from a completely different world, pretty much, just you know academically, socially, the whole thing. I try to look out for the undergrads as much as I can,” they said.
But now that they are in the final year of their PhD program, Litterio plans to “step back” from administrative tasks and “make sure that they’re running everything pretty much without me at this point.”
“I’m really glad that I was able to find and be accepted into this space,” Litterio added. “I love being in the group, and it’s really had a positive impact on my time at Brown.”
Noa Saviano is a senior staff writer covering Graduate Schools and Students. She is a sophomore from New York City and plans on concentrating in Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science.
