See the club brochure from my time! (please)
In my first year, Horizon club was not very active; rarely hosting a session. It was recently created as a merger of the decades old 'Astronomy club' and a new 'Physics club' which was under incubation for a year. A name of "Horizon: The Physics and Astronomy club of IIT Madras" was chosen.
In March 2017, IIT Kanpur was organising the fifth Inter-IIT tech meet. Previously IIT Kharagpur had organised a Messier Marathon as a part of the inter-IIT competition and IIT Kanpur followed up with that. The dates of the competition were co-incidental with our second quiz of the semester and hence the astro club was desperate to find members. Me, willing to bunk exams and give them later as make-up exams quickly got the opportunity. I had no primer with astronomy (unless you count the popular science works of prof. Narlikar and an astro-trip organised by Jyotrividya parisanstha Pune), and on our first session I was asking stupid questions like "Where is Orion in the sky?" (It hadn't dawned on me that stars also rise and set). The club only had a very old but reliable 8" reflector Celestron telescope with manual mount and a non-functioning viewfinder. We wrapped that telescope and took it more than two thousand kilometres to Kanpur where we competed against teams from a dozen other IITs.
I applied for a coordinator position at the Horizon: the Physics and Astronomy club. The new head was Somayajulu Dhulipala, a 9.8 pointer who was considered a demi-god for being good at literally everything. I had enthusiasm, and that is all CFI (Center for Innovation) looked for. Additionally I knew photoshop and the club needed a graphic designer. At this point I had printed and sold T-shirts of my own design and Somu wanted T-shirts for the club, so I was taken!
As coordinators my friend Yash and I were given a lot of freedom to organise sessions. We couldn't get enough of organising sessions and teaching people astronomy. We used to watch YouTube tutorials and educational videos and teach in classrooms. Meanwhile I also designed the club T-shirt and around a hundred people bought one (we sold them at a cheap price of Rs. 250!). We had gotten a lot of freshies interested in our club, and that was evident in the fact that around 21 of them applied to be coordinators next year! I had a minimal role to play in the projects that our club was working on but I did get involved, namely in 'Orbital Simulator project', 'Machine Learning exoplanet candidates identifier', 'Sky Watch Array Network' (we were a part of a national collaboration) and 'Handheld Spectrometer'.
Up till now the club had heads who were fourth years, so I had not considered applying for the head position. But as we had no third year candidates for the positions, and as it was otherwise the norm for third years to be heads at CFI clubs; I was motivated to apply for the position. After a challenging and long selection procedure, Aakila and I were selected as the new heads. We divided our labour as follows: I handled the public sphere of the club and Aakila managed projects. It was a very succesful year for us; I organised a total of 14 sessions including many lectures by distinguished professors, observation sessions, trips, theory sessions, workshops, competitions and so on. I even featured on live TV! Essentially I was working full time at the club, constantly moving around between CFI and the academic complex. I also made many connections for the club and purchased 4 neew telescopes for the club. We also mentored a junior astronomy club at Hindustan University. It was my best year at IIT Madras.
After Aakila and I retired as heads, we remained as mentors for the club; giving lectures and joining sessions and trips. The club gave me everything my department couldn't. It believed in me, it gave me confidence and it paved my path towards a career in astrophysics. By the time I retired as a head, the club was the largest student run astronomy club in India. I feel that it would be beneficial to create a superstructure of all the physics and astronomy clubs of IITs and IISERs.
