Ever since school started on Aug. 13, an array of changes were made to kickstart the year—a new Hall of Fame, field, and atrium—but out of all the changes, one of the most impactful was the newly enforced three-week club trials.
For years, the process of joining clubs was left unchanged. However, recently, the HS department has made it their priority to reform this traditional process into something new. Typically, the club process began with a simple one-day club fair on the first day of school, and later that week, a Google form would be released for the students to choose which club they wanted to participate in. Although there were no official complaints about the club selection process, the HS department ultimately deduced that because of the lack of genuine intentions from new members and ongoing confusion about which club is which, the ongoing club selection process was not sufficient to supply the knowledge needed to join clubs. Hence, the student executive committee was formed to reform such necessary changes.
After a month and a half of planning, the committee concluded that a three-week club trial could be a substantial part of the club-picking process. These trials essentially test the legitimacy of a student’s will to participate and also allow new members to get a grasp of how the clubs operate.
“Walking around the various trial meetings, I thought it was evident that there have been high levels of effort and engagement in the past month,” Chris Del Vecchio, Vice Principal of the HS department, said. “The overarching goal was that students join clubs with a better idea of what they’re getting themselves into, so for doing this for the first time, I would say that based on the positive feedback returned, the club trials were a rousing success.”
As a final evaluation of this year’s first 3-week club trials, it can be concluded that the results ended positively. Under the poll done on Tiger Times’ Instagram page, over 70% of the students agree that the club trials helped the students understand the club. Especially for rising freshmen, 80% claimed that the trials aided them in the club-picking process in HS.
“I initially thought the club trials were a bit too much,” Justin Chen (9), a new member of multiple HS clubs, said. “But after the first month, I came to realize that the club trials also helped me expand my options, and ultimately, I figured out some more specific details about the clubs that I am interested in. It makes me more confident in my choice when it comes to picking what club to do this year.”
Some positives supported the idea of the three-week club trials, but there were also some negative consequences. Even though the club trails benefitted rising freshmen, over 50% of the poll claimed that the three-week club trials were tedious. Additionally, the poll revealed that during the three-week club trials, only 30% of the students went to different clubs each week. This signifies that, for the majority of the HS body, only a few actually experimented with different club trials.
Based on the results from the poll, the full process did help test the genuine intentions of the interested new members but did not truly expand the options of different clubs for the majority of the student body.
