Excessive extra curriculars

For many of us, college is right around the corner. In preparation for this and out of competitive paranoia, students often overwhelm themselves and put more on their plates more than they can handle. The result of this race to "get ahead" is students taking on copious courses, clubs and extracurriculars that they often can’t relate to. Regardless of their disinterest, they still take them in the pursuit of credit.  I personally recall experiencing this first hand with the Delians Honor Society on campus, and the Santa Monica College history classes. I heard about two popular organizations that many of my fellow peers were in. The first being Delians, a popular honor society on campus that is focused on community service. After hearing about it and seeing all my friends apply, it caught my attention. I asked people applying for more information on what Delians actually was, and every single person would reply that it would look good on college applications and it was a good club to join. That made me wonder why no one knew what this organization they were joining was, and about how many of them were just joining to have something to list on their college applications. I brought this same thought towards another growing club on campus created by a fellow peer. Soup Club was a popular and growing club last year. This club is a humanitarian effort based at school that has a goal to end hunger in the local and global homeless populations. This made me wonder if the same thing was happening here too. Ryan Kashanchi (’21) explained that the fact that they had up to 40 people at one time, but it slowly went down and now they currently have 15 members, which is not necessarily a bad thing. “With fewer, more dedicated people, we will be able to manage everyone more closely and actually get more stuff done,” Kashanchi said. Listening to this, I saw my point shine through a bit. With the people uninterested in the club gone, Kashanchi feels that he will be able to run a successful club. In addition to clubs, a popular course taken during the summer and this school year were AP History classes. This summer I encountered many incoming sophomores were taking varieties of AP History courses. A popular one for incoming sophomores was AP World History at Santa Monica College. This invoked my thoughts once more, so I decided to ask a former student who had taken this AP course over the summer. Katarina Ceguerra (’21) took this course this past summer and spoke about her experience. Ceguerra explained how she chose to take the course over the summer because it would save her some time during the school year, and like other students enrolled, “. . . because I wanted the college credit.” Ceguerra isn’t the only one with these thoughts; as I asked around, many replied with very similar answers.Looking past this discovery, next time we decide what electives and clubs to take on we should think twice about why we want to take them and whether we’re overloading our plates or doing it for the right reasons.