it’s the most wonderful time of the year 🎶

Not quite Christmas, but the club fair!

I’m Phaedra, a hack clubber from Boston, Massachusetts! I run a Hack Club at my school, and here’s the story of how I had the most extravagant table at my school’s club fair.

school lore!

My school prides itself on having so many extracurricular opportunities, and this event is the debut of clubs—specifically my school’s Hack Club—to both new and returning students. A good chunk of students like STEM subjects. The bigger problem is: circles generally develop based on career interests at my school, and the computer science community is not that big.

While my school’s AP Computer Science classes have the highest AP enrollment, most of the students want the grade over the content. A lot of the coding flies over people's heads and as a result, people don't find the joy in coding.

*the* poster!

I hoped to change that mindset through the club fair. And sooner rather than later, my co-president and I were off on a race to create the most extravagant poster possible after a pretty expensive run to the stationery aisle in Target. These were our results on the first day:

We didn’t just have the poster, though. We also had a candy bowl to incentivize members to join.

Now in retrospect, this definitely backfired. Students would throw wrappers anywhere but a trash can. In the future, we might not go with candy. Still, we made sure to have the candy bowl as it would bring people to our table who otherwise would probably not have visited.

The most popular aspect of our stand was the STICKERS! Hack Club has awesome, high-quality stickers that club leaders can request for their club, and these stickers were free advertisements for students to visit our table and join the club.

With all of our preparations and 40+ US dollars spent on the candy alone (those bags are NOT cheap), now comes both the easy and hard part: chatting with prospective members.

chatting with students

We had a specific audience we intended to target (high school students, given our school is for students in grades 7-12), but I learned very quickly to expect the unexpected. During the middle school club fair, we had 20 signups from seventh graders alone!

When it came to chatting with students, many weren’t really inclined to talk because they were reading the loads of content on the poster. For the ones that did though, it was usually because their friends encouraged them to sign up and would come up to us to ask the most frequent question of the day:

Hackers wanted? Will I learn to hack into the government?

Now, our goal of the poster was to reel students in. The giant “Hackers Wanted!” sign on the poster did its job, but now was an opportunity to explain to students that Hack Club explores “hacking” more creatively. Did it work? For most people, yes. For others, it (shockingly) was a disappointment.

takeaways

We ended up getting a total of around 30-40 signups from the fair. It was an understandable amount of people that ended up visiting and joining the club, and our notoriously decked-out poster board retired until our next appearance in the spring: Boston Latin Academy Comic Con!