Getting in on the ground level of an up-and-coming club is nothing new for Jackie Indrisano.

After four years as manager of afterHOURS, having joined the on-campus nightclub during its infancy, Indrisano will step down later this month to assume a similar position at Harvard University next year.

“An opportunity presented itself, and I acted on it,” she said. “It’s really that basic.”

Although Indrisano described the move as “bittersweet,” she said the club will continue to move forward without her.

“The club is in a really, really good position right now, on campus and beyond campus,” she said. “It’s gotten to a point where people call us, and we don’t have to work on outreach as much.”

At the center of the club’s success are the students, Indrisano said – those who visit the club or help keep it in operation, a group she likens to “a family tree.”

“Without that role from students, we couldn’t function at all,” she said. “We need guys and gals to run the boards and the lights, and without them, the club would just have television and a movie, and it’s become so much more because of students rising to the occasion.”

One of those students is Jessie Goldbass, a senior communications and music industry major who has frequented the club over the last several years and will be stepping up her involvement to serve as event manager for the upcoming year. To her, Indrisano is both a mentor and a friend.

“She makes everyone feel like we’re in control of running our own programs,” Goldbass said. “She delegates our responsibilities well and she makes you feel like you’re worth working as a student here, that your ideas will never be shot down.”

Junior communications major Scott Hultman, who works as an event manager at afterHOURS, echoed a similar sentiment.

“Jackie is very student-oriented,” Hultman said. “She has a good handle on what a student wants and how a student acts in certain situations, and she’s very good at reading what’s best for the students or what’s best for the club.”

With Starbucks opening at afterHOURS in the fall, Indrisano said the two businesses will work together to attract a wider base than it has in the past.

“They are going to add a lot,” she said. “It’s sort of like the elegant friend that joined the party, that comes in well-dressed, well-suited, speaks a certain language and has a good product that people know, and afterHOURS is the way cool cousin that everybody wants to get to know.”

Nevertheless, Indrisano said she is excited for what lies ahead and the prospect of once again starting a new project from the ground up.

“I always seem to gravitate toward that, and I think you learn more with that old saying, ‘baptism by fire,'” she said. “If you get into a place that is very corporate and stringent, with a structure and there’s no deviation from it, I’d probably get in trouble and I’d have to leave because I’d be looking for the gray area outside of the box.”