University theme-park clubs are becoming more common. Amusement rides and theme-park-going is a familiar activity for most students. To tell stories or deliver immersive experiences begins with the crafting of the story or theme itself, and numerous creative disciplines contribute to the project execution, including architecture, landscape architecture, environmental graphics, interior design, set design to tell those stories in compelling places. They also contain a variety of technologies, from structures and mechanisms to digital media to deliver the immersive storytelling. The choice of which stories and experiences will be presented is based on strategic decisions, extensive economic analysis, and business analytics. Theme parks also contain the management of operational processes from guest-facing hospitality and service delivery to team-facing management and support of diversified employee cohorts, including entertainment and creative fields.
Students may join a theme park club simply because they expect the group’s activities might include some friendly excursions to local amusement parks or destination theme parks, and social gatherings to talk about favourite parks, favourite rides, favourite souvenirs, most anticipated new rides, and most dearly missed closed attractions.
Some students may join a club to think about their academic field and how it is used in the theme park environment. Theme parks contain examples of virtually any field of study, not just the obvious applications of mechanical engineering and theatrical set design, but a wide range of academic fields, from cyber security to physics to public health. Visiting parks and building models of rides and attractions can bring academic learning to life more than they experience in a classrooms and labs. When coursework becomes tedious, it can be refreshing to find an interesting application of what we’re learning.
Other students join because themed entertainment is their dream industry and where they envision applying their degree to a particular part of a theme park project. In a story I hear over and over, these students can often look back to middle school when they first knew they wanted to design or work in theme parks, often before they even knew what they wanted to do in theme parks, and what kind of academic training they would pursue to make their dream possible. For these students, the club is not just excursions and projects on campus, but also industry networking and conferences.
All of these kinds of students can find themselves in the university theme park club. If there was no theme park club, the first two groups might find other things to enjoy during their time in university. The third type needs the club to help them make the industry connections and build their peer networks who will become their professional colleagues in the future.
While any student can start a new club with a few like-minded friends, high school seniors might look for universities with established theme park clubs, so that they can walk in during Orientation Week and find their people right away, and not have to go through a couple of years of club start-up and establishment.
University clubs have various names, whether designated a “Club”, a “Group”, a “Team”, etc., including Theme Park Engineering, Theme Park Design, or Theme Park Enthusiasts. Some clubs are established as student chapters of the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), with names like TEA @ UniversityName. Our own club was established as Ryerson (our former university name) Entertainment Design, becoming Ryerson Thrill Club, and later Toronto Metropolitan University Thrill Club, reflecting an affiliation with my lab.
To benefit those with career aspirations, I strongly advise clubs to recruit members across academic programs. No matter the program, no one will graduate and design an entire ride or attraction. The word “imagineer”, as one company calls it, is often misunderstood to mean one person is assigned to design an attraction top to bottom, on their own, and therefore must be a great illustrator and also qualified to perform multiple feats of engineering. While every project will have a leader, who may be the “face” of the project, that is not an entry level job, and they have come through the ranks in one of many specialties as part of a team of hundreds of professionals. Interdisciplinary club interaction as a student is an excellent way to prepare for future careers, to learn what other disciplines are learning in school, and how their knowledge will complement one’s own on future projects.
The ongoing burden of interdisciplinary clubs, perhaps, will be finding its institutional champion to access financial support for its activities. Universities represent themselves as moving beyond “silos” and collaboration across faculties but, at the end of the day, both students and professors “belong to” a Dean in a faculty as part of their headcount. If a club has support from only a specific faculty or course union, they are either deprived of the valuable collaboration from other disciplines, or the students from that faculty are funded to join industry excursions while students from other faculties must self-fund their participation.
Another problem for many clubs is that few have faculty advisors who are themselves interested in theme parks or amusement rides and devices, to be able to provide industry guidance. Faculty interested in themed experience and attractions (from business to creative arts to engineering and technology) can find like-minded academics at the Themed Experience and Attractions Academic Society.
Toronto Metropolitan University Thrill Club can be reached by email at thrillclub [at] torontomu {dot} ca
