A closer look at Winsor’s High Commitment Clubs

On By Winsor SchoolIn Front Page

By Haley K. Crystal Y. and Caitlin S.

The ideal day: grasping for answers in front of an intimidating panel of established venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and investment bankers as they grill you on your valuation of a pillow company. Alternatively: launching into your fourth tangent in your 8-minute extemporaneous speech on a topic you frankly aren’t sure how to argue yet while a Roxbury Latin faculty member scribbles notes and ranks you last of 4 in your debate room. Scenarios like these are all-too-familiar to students that partake in Winsor’s high-commitment clubs; weeks, months, and even years of hard work and dedication are tested in a single annual MUN conference, a state Mock Trial championship, a Robotics competition, a qualifier Ethics bowl, or other such events. Clubs and organizations are the essence of student life at Winsor and take on a variety of forms. The executive staff of the Banner, as members of a high-commitment club ourselves, want to highlight, celebrate, and illuminate the contributions of our high-commitment clubs to communities both in and beyond Winsor. We know that it can be difficult to grasp the sheer amount of time and energy that the heads, faculty advisors, and members dedicate to their clubs, so we at The Banner hope to extend the appreciation of the student body to the hard work that has helped these clubs flourish this year. The Banner interviewed the heads of 7 self-proclaimed “high-commitment” clubs in order to present a deeper dive into them; we do not wish to undermine the efforts of other clubs and student organizations but merely to appreciate the structure, drive, and ambition of these 7 clubs.

Debate (Hana Karanja ’20, Sarah Albert-Rozenberg ’20)

What are the main weekly tasks you have to coordinate?

  • We have to hold club meetings, officer (heads, secretaries, and advisors) meetings, 90 minute weekend practices (where we prepare for tournaments and develop our public speaking skills). We also hold additional practices outside of our weekend ones for those who wish to practice for an upcoming tournament.

What is the biggest challenge your club faces?

  • We have six people in the club who are in leadership positions (two heads, two secretaries, and two advisors), so it can sometimes be difficult to communicate amongst ourselves. Additionally, because so many students participate in debate, we have to tailor our teaching to fit a wide range of skill levels.

What was the most valuable skill you learned from leading the club?

  • Definitely collaboration

What does the club contribute to the school that wouldn’t have been possible as a low-commitment club?

  • If it were a low-commitment club, there wouldn’t be enough time to properly learn and develop the skills needed to do well in our tournaments; the time dedicated really pays off and feeds into self-confidence.

Model UN (MUN) (Asrah Rizvi ’20, Danya Dubrow-Compaine ’20, Ifeanyi Umunna ’20)

What are the main weekly tasks you have to coordinate?

  • The heads are in charge of leading 50 minute meetings during clubs block to teach new students about MUN and help them prepare for conferences, as well as running lunch meetings where we do public speaking exercises and learn about UN terminology.

What is the biggest challenge your club faces?

  • Unlike most MUN teams, we only go to one conference a year (we technically go to two, but each student only attends one), so we don’t really have much of a chance to actually implement the skills we work on throughout the year. This year, both MUN and other conference-oriented clubs have pushed to go to more conferences, so students have had the opportunity to attend up to three; while a huge improvement, but still significantly fewer outside opportunities than Debate and Mock Trial have. 

What was the most valuable skill you learned from leading the club?

  • We learned how to plan and organize meetings, teach new skills to people, and think on our feet.

What does the club contribute to the school that wouldn’t have been possible as a low-commitment club?

  • Because it’s a high-commitment club, we have much more support from Winsor to go to events outside of school than other clubs, who have to arrange it themselves, although not as much as other higher-commitment clubs. Also, because MUN has such a specific skill set/vocabulary, being able to meet more frequently allows us as a team to really develop those skills.

Collect (Avery Beber ’20, Asrah Rizvi ’20, Lulu Ansari ’20, Mishael Quraishi ’21)

What are the main weekly tasks you have to coordinate?

  • We coordinate amongst the executive staff, meet three times a cycle to go through requests and proposals, meet frequently with Ms. Markenson, run Upper School meetings and Collect forums, plan sibling squad and food events, as well as address problems as they arise.

What is the biggest challenge your club faces?

  • There’s always too much to do and never enough time to do it all. It’s also hard to incorporate all voices, because many people have strong opinions.

What was the most valuable skill you learned from leading the club?

  • We definitely learned a lot of communication skills (specifically how to communicate with both students and adults), as well as making sure to have extreme foresight and overestimate how long things will take in order to err on the side of safety.

What does the club contribute to the school that wouldn’t have been possible as a low-commitment club?

  • So much—if we were a low-commitment club, nothing would get done and a lot of work would have to be done online on our own time outside of school.

Robotics (Emi Fong-Gallagher ’20, Reethika Digumarthy ’20)

What are the main weekly tasks you have to coordinate?

  • Each week, we create an agenda to plan out our time for the regular Thursday and Friday meetings. Depending on what is coming up (an outreach event, a competition, etc), we prioritize different tasks. The team is made up of three sub-groups: building, coding, and business/outreach. Each sub-group also has their own set of tasks to complete during each meeting. During the past few weeks for example, we were preparing for our second qualifying competition on February 8. The building and coding sub-groups worked on fixing and testing the autonomous code while also practicing driving. The business sub-group devoted the meeting time to compiling and formatting the engineering notebook and other documentation using LaTeX, a text formatting program. At the beginning of the season, all the sub-groups worked on brainstorming designs and thinking through game strategy ideas. At this time, our main tasks were effectively scheduling our brainstorming and prototyping time, so we had a lot of ideas to evaluate but did not infringe upon building time, which was something we struggled with last year.

What is the biggest challenge your club faces?

  • One of the biggest challenges we have had for the past three years is figuring out the best way to make sure all of the sub-groups are flexible and communicate. Because there are so many tasks to be completed during the main build season (October to January), we have found that having sub-groups that are in charge of certain tasks is the most efficient way to stay on schedule. However, it is difficult to make sure everyone knows what the other sub-groups are doing and can get involved in other parts of the robotics team. To address this challenge, we have become more consistent in our communication by switching Slack, which is a messaging platform that allows us to organize our thoughts/media outside of meetings, so everyone has access to the main tasks/projects the sub-groups are working on. We are also developing our engineering notebook, which documents our engineering design process and journey as a team, so team members can use it as an accessible reference source to understand what other parts of the team are doing.

What was the most valuable skill you have learned from leading the club?

  • The importance of scheduling our time! It’s really easy to become overwhelmed by all of the things we have to do (and the short amount of time to do them in) and lose track of some important tasks or not maximize meetings times. Creating agendas prior to the meeting, meeting as a team to discuss sub-group goals, and communicating through Slack and our engineering notebook have been methods we improved upon this year to make sure we can keep everything on track.

What does the club contribute to the school that wouldn’t have been possible as a low-commitment club?

  • Without having the time allocated for high-commitment clubs, we would definitely not be able to build a robot and develop a team that models our competition’s requirements. Also, in our first/second years (before we started emphasizing the high-commitment/team nature of robotics), we struggled with consistent attendance, so developing this designation of the team during Club Fair and our meeting open houses has been critical to fostering a dedicated team of students who are genuinely passionate about the FIRST Tech Challenge (the competition we compete in)!

Ethics (Sadie Golen ’20, Thomasina Hare ’21)

What are the main weekly tasks you have to coordinate?

  • We review and discuss cases during club meetings, prepare 15 cases for the Ethics bowl and spend Friday nights having 90 minute meetings to prepare further for the Ethics bowl. 

What is the biggest challenge your club faces?

  • Logistics, planning attendance

What was the most valuable skill you have learned from leading the club?

  • We have learned how to properly include a variety of opinionated voices without significant conflict.

What does the club contribute to the school that wouldn’t have been possible as a low-commitment club?

  • We participate in competitions that help develop our public speaking skills and boost our self-confidence.

Venture Capital (Avery Beber ’20, Haley Kwoun ’20)

What are the main weekly tasks you have to coordinate?

  • We meet both during lunch and outside of school to plan and prepare for upcoming competitions, during which we coordinate with other club leaders in the league.

What is the biggest challenge your club faces?

  • Our club has a lot of interest, which is really great to see, but often really difficult to accommodate, especially because we’re not experts and thus we need help on the weekend from experts in the field.

What was the most valuable skill you have learned from leading the club?

  • We’ve learned a lot about the whole world of business—not just technicalities but also how to look critically at adults and think on our feet to defend our decisions, as well as general public speaking skills

What does the club contribute to the school that wouldn’t have been possible as a low-commitment club?

  • We spend a lot of time with local companies and get an introduction to the business world at a higher level than high schoolers would generally be able to achieve.