When I toured Lakeside for the first time in 8th grade, I was most excited for two things that were constantly brought up by the senior tour guides: One was the coffee at the WCC, and the other was Clubs Fair. As someone who came to Lakeside from a middle school of only about 90 people and a grand total of three clubs — all of which were either teacher-led and functioned like a mini class or had heavy parent involvement and ran like a college farm — hearing about a fair in which students could choose between over a hundred student-led and student-driven organizations seemed like a dream come true. Now, having attended three separate Clubs Fairs, just hearing the name fills me with a particular ire.
To the dismay of my 14-year-old self, the state of clubs at Lakeside is not as fantastic as it originally seemed. In fact, Lakeside swings on the other side of the issue altogether, and functions with far too many clubs and not enough oversight from the community to satisfy the very purpose of their existence. Unlike my middle school’s club scarcity, Lakeside suffers from an excess of overlapping clubs, infrequent attendance, and a schoolwide lack of inclusive club culture.
It’s important to begin with how we define a club — perhaps this is where Lakeside’s problems all start, considering that as a school, we have no formal definition or standard of what a club is. All you need to do to start a club is submit a oval. For our purposes, I’ll paraphrase what has been written on the Lakeside weform for consideration at the beginning of the year and await (basically guaranteed) Stud Gov apprbsite: Clubs are student-driven and student-led spaces that allow students to collaborate with peers in pursuing their passions and curiosities across a wide range of topics. It’s a simple enough definition, but even this bar is rarely cleared.
Lakeside currently has over 92 clubs for a student body of 595 — roughly one club for every 6.5 students. To put that in perspective, the largest high school in Seattle, Lincoln High School, has fewer clubs than Lakeside (only 90) but has a student body of over 1700. According to the Tatler poll, around 70% of students feel that we have too many clubs, as opposed to 26% who say we have “just the right amount” and 4% who somehow claim we have “too few”. Cutting down the number of clubs we have to match a ratio like Lincoln’s is unnecessary, but we need to consider what benefits having fewer clubs offers.
Fewer clubs mean that students are more likely to dedicate time to the organizations they truly want to be a part of, and can help strengthen a club and establish its position in the community, rather than spreading its resources thin. With nearly 100 different clubs in a relatively small high school, it’s hard for clubs to get the focus or bandwidth they each individually need to become successful.
Individuality may not be a concern, however. An undoubted reason for the oversaturation of clubs at Lakeside is simply due to the overlap between many of the subject matters. From what I can see of the official clubs list, there are at least four clubs that deal with medicine explicitly, and quite a few more that at the very least would deal with similar subject material (e.g. Biology Club, Neuroscience Club).
And lest you think that I’m dogging on the STEM clubs, I notice a similar trend for clubs relating to business, with various flavors meeting throughout the week at different times to talk about investments, global business, financial freedom and the like. I’m not trying to attack any of these clubs, or their leaders, but the reality stands that most of these clubs are not, in fact, spaces to collaborate with like-minded peers. Especially if those same peers are for some reason at a duplicate club in a separate building. And we haven’t even begun to talk about clubs that are chapters of external organizations that exist solely to fundraise. These clubs do not allow students to collaborate with their peers to pursue any passions or topics, nor do they meet particularly frequently to form some sort of community. They do, however, look particularly good on a resume.
Some might say that this is a non-issue. So what if we have more clubs than the average school? Does every single club have to have the same level of engagement? Lakeside touts its clubs as “evidence that Lakeside students are passionate (and just plain curious) about a wide range of topics.” Even if those topics overlap or don’t really engage other students, isn’t it better for Lakesiders to simply be getting together in community and creating, especially if those efforts are student-driven?
Yes, obviously. I hold a certain affection for Lakeside’s propensity towards niche, special interest clubs. But in my opinion, the large amounts of clubs we have aren’t driven (solely) by any sort of interest, but rather by a tendency that, for the purpose of this essay, I will deem “clubsmaxxing.” While not a singularly Lakeside phenomenon, clubsmaxxing occurs when students try to start clubs or position themselves as leaders of a club for an ulterior motive, which I’ve found to almost always be college.
It’s no secret that colleges value leadership highly, which often leads many high schoolers to seek out places where they can easily become leaders, for many reasons if not to also get to put it on their resume. The club form and Stud Gov pose a benign barrier for those willing to put in maybe an hour of work on an application form, only for them to officially be listed as a Lakeside-recognized club.
Where this starts to become a problem is when this desire to found new clubs starts to inhibit the very purpose of a club in the first place — to form community and connect with others who have a similar interest to you. Let’s use the consortium of medical clubs as an example: Due to the number of medical-related clubs, students who were interested in medicine must now decide which of the four clubs about medicine they must attend. In this decision, they factor into consideration which club their upperclassmen friends lead, and decide to commit to that one.
Instead of uniting interests, the separate clubs have prevented the new students from joining a larger community of interested peers, and instead forced them to remain within their friend groups. This is a common occurrence: I have often witnessed clubs whose Venn diagrams between a common friend group and club community are a perfect circle. Clubsmaxxing isn’t helped by lax StudGov guidelines such as In light of what Dr. Bynum had said about wanting to build community during this school year, it seems unprincipled to not address the role that our clubs (to which we dedicate entire ACT periods) have in building that community in the first place.
I can’t pretend like I have all the solutions. For everything I’ve bounced off of my friends for approval, I’ve found a comparative number of new problems. Should the administration step in and force certain clubs to combine? Should Stud Gov restrict the number of students we allow to be club leaders? Should we start making it harder for students to create clubs in the first place, potentially hindering genuine curiosity on certain subjects? I’m still unsure. What I do know is that the solution starts with honesty. Students need to start being honest with themselves on why they’re starting a club and if there might already be one that fits their interest.
As a school, we need to reflect on our priorities about what we want clubs to accomplish. If we truly want clubs to build community, then we need to start holding them to a certain standard. That might mean demanding that every club have a constitution and is required to submit a year-long plan of activities, StudGov starting to turn down more applications, and an overall cultural shift away from clubsmaxxing (last time I use that word, I promise). None of these fixes are easy, and we do risk hurting the innovation of new Lakeside clubs altogether. But what’s worse is continuously having community spaces that are the antithesis of Lakeside’s values. My 8th-grade self was right to be excited about Clubs Fair. The clubs are here — but the community isn’t.