Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

In this blog, we’ll talk about starting your own STEM club at school. Perhaps you’re currently enrolled in a school that has dozens of clubs already established, or maybe your school doesn’t have any. Doesn’t matter which category you fall in, there are always ample opportunities to start your very own club with your friends.

But why should you even consider it? There are several reasons why you should consider it. Doesn’t matter what field of STEM you fall into, any subject or field of interest can be a great opportunity to learn something new hands-on. Whether you’re interested in rockets, microbes, or computers, starting a club is a great way to:

• Build closer relationships with your friends.
• Make the subject more interesting by getting hands-on.
• Gain experience to talk about when applying for university or job.

Challenges to look out for

Starting your own club can be a huge undertaking, and you are bound to face challenges along the way. Speaking from experience, which I will talk about later, there is a number of directions doubts, and challenges that might come from. These can include school administration, lack of resources, lack of team motivation, and failure. But all of these can be overcome, trust me.

My story: Building an RC airplane

Let me tell you a story, back in 2021 I moved to a foreign country to start grade 11 in the IB program. Didn’t know anyone, nor did I know what to expect from the, rather small, IB school. About a week or so into the school year, we were walking to the bus stop with my friend. Somehow the discussion turned into RC models, and my friend jokingly said we should build one at school.

Perhaps it’s my curiosity that always gets the better of me, but I have a habit of taking joke suggestions way too seriously. And that’s how the journey of starting the club began. The very next morning I wrote an email to the principal, asking in a very hypothetical way whether this would be something the school would be willing to support. They didn’t stop me straight away but told me to give them more details.

This is where the first lesson learned comes in, don’t expect people to cheer you on every step of the way. If you’re a high school student, people will inevitably doubt your expertise, even more so if you’re at a school for only a week. But I didn’t let that discourage me. After brainstorming with my friend, we came up with basic parameters. A few days later we packaged them into an email to the administration, and attached, in hindsight, some very crude sketches.

Now we were officially on the school’s radar. This started a month-long process of going back and forth with the administration. Definitely not my favorite part, but in the end, it was all worth it, we got most of the funding we asked for, as well as a space in the school to do it. After this, we started going to a number of classes (both younger and older) to get some more people interested in joining our club.

I’ll be talking about the entire experience from the leadership position, as I was responsible for coordinating the entire team and filling in at whichever position was needed. One thing you need to realize as a leader of a club is that, you're still in high school. Even though you might know more from, for example, online courses you took, never assume that other people did that as well. This is where you as a leader come in, you need to take on the responsibility to make sure people know what they’re doing, and that they feel valued and appreciated for the work they’re doing, and if they don’t you have to be willing to stay late with them and help.

Especially in the beginning, I distributed a number of learning materials and books among the team members to study and familiarize themselves with the materials. This is where my own personal experience in building and flying models came in really handy, and I ended up hosting weekly seminars combined with an all-hands meeting where we not only went through what needs to be done the coming week but also talked about the entire theory behind it. Undoubtedly, there were times I felt I jumped into the deep end and didn’t know what I was doing, but communication is crucial in situations like that. If you’re honest with your team and willing to admit when you’re wrong, you would be surprised how willing are people to collaborate and work together to solve the problem.

This cycle of working continued as time went on, but that’s not to say we didn’t hit rough patches as well. Whether that’s a simple lack of motivation, exams coming up, or other reasons. There will be times when for whatever reason the team won’t work to its full potential. In times like these, you have to express empathy and communicate, and always be upfront with your team. For example, send a group message that since exams are coming up people should focus on that and not necessarily work on the project. Or when it's a simple loss of motivation, don’t call people out in the group chat, rather approach them individually and discuss any issues there might be.

After working on our plane intermittently for about 8 months, it was finally ready to fly. We were all ecstatic, with a 3m wingspan, made mostly out of 3d printed parts and foam board. And that’s the story of how we built our very own plane and started the first student-run club at our school.

It was the end of the year, so we left the plane in the school and started scheming what things to add or improve next year. We had a few ideas in mind, such as dropping small packages from it, however, come September, IB happened. For any of you who are currently studying in the IB, you know that year 2 hits hard. We were all hit with working on our IAs, EEs, and all other IB obligations so we all decided to suspend work on our plane indefinitely. The lesson to take away from this is that you should always treat your classes as a priority. Sure we could’ve pushed on and worked on it, but at what sacrifice, potentially jeopardize our IB diploma? Sometimes you just have to be ready to walk away for some time when circumstances warrant it.

Recipe for starting a club at school

This was a rather specific story about how I started a club at my school. But the procedures and lessons learned to transform into practically any club you’re interested in. Maybe coding is more your thing and you have a coding project you could start a club around, or you’re interested in astronomy and want to observe the stars, or look at microbes under a microscope. All of these and many more are interesting club ideas, and the good thing about starting your own club is that you’re starting it and you can decide what to do. Below are a few main steps or checkpoints you should think about when starting a club.

1. Ask your friends.
2. Email the administration.
3. Get resources together.
4. Start learning about the concept.
5. Make sure people have tasks they are up for.
6. Ensure motivation and time management throughout.

In short, in this blog, we first looked at some of the reasons one might start a club at school. Then I talked about my personal experience in starting a club at my school. And lastly, we looked at the recipe for how to start a club at your school. Hope you found this useful, and be sure to email us at support@chanceinternships if you have any questions!