Hyemin Lee '26
Edited by Sophia Kim '26
From trivia games to cool demonstrations, the club fair held in September marked a new year of club involvement at SAS. As one of the busiest annual events, club fair plays a significant role at our school, enabling freshmen and sophomores to find community in a variety of interests for the first time. For this year it was moved up the timeline compared to the past, to grant clubs the opportunity to start sooner and get new members involved earlier. Writing this article late into October, at this time most of the clubs have already held multiple meetings with a fresh batch of eager members like we see each year.
Club life is undeniably a core part of student life at SAS, with numerous options each year covering a wide range of interests and hobbies. Whether it’s something more niche like the math modeling club or something of broader range like service clubs, there are over 108 total registered student life groups here at SAS, each offering students a unique avenue for exploration beyond academics.
These clubs provide students a chance to explore their diverse interests outside of the classroom - whether it’s through visiting hospitals, volunteering at shelters, learning new skills, etc. They open the door to invaluable opportunities for each student, and the students reciprocate with undeniable dedication as seen through the growing number of clubs and efforts gone into developing them further. Although I couldn’t get the exact statistics to back this up, every single person I know at school is involved in at least one club.
Personally, I’ve always found it so cool that SAS has just that many different passions and hobbies. With 108 clubs, even the most niche passions can find a home. Whether it be drawing, crocheting, creative writing - everyone has lingering interests like these, but not everyone chooses to pursue them. I think it’s nice when our school has communities that allow each of us to not take this step alone. The idea of being able to explore, bounce ideas off each other, and grow together through our shared passions is clearly a great benefit of the numerous clubs and student life groups. Even niche interests are met with opportunities, making club culture one of the school’s strongest assets.
However, behind this facade of a nearly perfect club system - that in theory works well - there are still some fundamental issues with the culture surrounding clubs at SAS. Specifically, the club culture here seems to focus more on quantity over quality, titles over contributions, and creations over consistent effort.
With pressure on all the students in SAS to overload themselves with clubs and different activities, membership and officer positions are starting to be treated more as a checklist, than activities students truly immerse themselves into. I’ve personally seen many 9th graders be involved in so many clubs that they rotate on how they spend their weekly lunches as their club meeting dates overlap, going to each club just enough to barely meet the membership attendance requirements. This feels very unfortunate in the sense that clubs should be a way students can explore their passions, not a source of stress and overload. This has also been the case with many upperclassmen who have multiple officer positions to juggle. Although their contributions to so many clubs are definitely admirable, just the sheer quantity of the clubs they need to juggle likely affect the quality of the work they can put into each of the clubs.
Furthermore, this same pressure to be involved in so many different clubs and activities seems to cause the effect of more superficial clubs being created. I’ve been there before - involved in new clubs where the weekly meetings slowly turn biweekly, turning into triweekly, until the club eventually fizzles out to a state of inactivity, only alive in name. Creation is a lot easier than maintaining a club. It doesn’t take a lot to create a WeChat group chat and fill out some forms, but it does take an immense amount of effort to plan out weekly meetings, take attendance every week, plan out meaningful events, etc. The emphasis should be on the sustaining of these clubs, not on the creation of them.
Although all clubs claim to be motivated by passion, to some extent, it’s hard to ignore the role that college applications play. A running joke at our school is that the senior officers who finish submitting their college applications no longer show up to the clubs they once claimed to be passionate about. While this may be an exaggeration, it’s not hard to see a dip in participation after application deadlines. This pressure to pad resumes can often dilute the true purpose of clubs.
This is especially problematic when dealing with service and activism clubs. When leaders and members are not putting in their full efforts into these clubs, they become a form of performative activism - a club that lacks any sort of meaningful impact yet claims to be helping the issue. Performance activism happens to only distract from real efforts and is in a way exploitative of the people that the clubs are claiming to help, as it reduces genuine causes to hollow gestures. Although there are without a doubt so many great service and activism clubs at our school that are achieving great results, there also seem to be a handful that may not be living up to this same standard.
Overall, although the number of clubs at our school is great - the tens of clubs here allow such a wide array of different passions to be explored - at the same time, it’s important we don’t treat clubs as ticks in a checklist and nothing more. It’s time we shift our focus away from numbers and titles and towards building a genuine, meaningful community.
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