New School Clubs take over MCHS
Universal Community for Choise and Citizen Science Club out recruiting for new Carrillo club members (Photo: Jungyeon Lee, The Puma Prensa)
by Jungyeon Lee, staff writer
Maria Carrillo High School has an abundance of amazing clubs, and students create new ones every year. Not every club has to be educational or require a lot of after school hours. Below are some new clubs that MCHS students can join if they want to make some new friends or just acquire a new hobby.
MCHS senior Griffin Quan created the Saver Sports Club to contribute to the community by donating sports equipment to people who cannot afford buying it. Members of the club are active outside of school, too, emailing sponsors and gathering sports equipment. They do most of this independently, but their advisor, Natasha Deakins, helps them out. Their sponsors donate money or their old equipment. Griffin Quan said, “So far, we have donated to elementary schools in Tanzania and a soccer club in Chowchilla, California. We are working on donations to Mexico but also local clinics for elementary schools in Sonoma County.” The club typically tries to donate in places where the members have connections, shipping the equipment if the destination is far away and driving there if it is local. The club meets in room N-1 every Wednesday at lunch; check it out if you are interested in making a difference.
Ricardo Bolanos, sophomore, created the Medical Careers Club to form a community of people who are interested in working in the medical field in the future. He was inspired because he wants to work in the medical field, as well, as a neurosurgeon. “We’re going to have medical professionals come and talk to us about what they do and their story and we’re gonna be able to learn from them and be inspired by that,” explained Bolanos. The club will also have discussions about the members’ future careers and do activities to get to know each other. The club does not require out-of-school participation, but he hopes that people will spread their interest outside of school. The club gathers on the second Thursday of every month in room E-1 and welcomes everyone aspiring to work in medicine.
Krystal Luong, a senior at MCHS, made the MCHS Genshin Club where you can meet people who play Genshin Impact and have fun. Genshin Impact is a very popular open world action/role playing game with Gacha elements in it. The club has a very relaxed atmosphere, and it’s a place to talk about things you like in the game. Luong stated that the Genshin Club “was more of a collective effort because we realized that a lot of people we knew or had connections with also played the same game.” When asked if the members do anything outside of the club, she replied, “This is a grindy game; Genshin is a second job, so yes, we do work after school if they plan to do their daily commissions.” MCHS Genshin Club has a Discord server that you can join, which Luong says makes up about half of the fun. The club is, right now, meeting every Thursday in D-5, but they are planning to make it every other Thursday to avoid club meeting conflicts. Get in on it to have fun with your peers.
Sofia Sodhi and Roshni Davé, MCHS juniors, revived the Origami Club. It was made when they were freshmen, but the club wasn’t very active until this year because they didn’t know how to run a club their freshman year, and they had to do distance learning during most of their sophomore year. Now they are meeting with students more regularly. In room N-1 during lunch break every Tuesday, the club does a simple tutorial on how to fold a new type of origami. The advisor, Natasha Deakins, provides the club with papers to fold with and also space for displaying finished works. They collaborated with the MCHS Amnesty International Club to create a long term origami project which they call the “1000 Crane Black Lives Matter mural, currently displayed on the wall in the library. This year, the club is planning to have another collaboration with Amnesty International, focusing on something about the environment this time. Join them to be a part of it.
Juniors Delaney Bright and Kamila Salazar created the MCHS Red Cross Club, which is a branch of the Red Cross organization. They started thinking about the club in their sophomore year, wanting a way to do community service in a way that interests them, and this aligns with the mission of the Red Cross: to give humanitarian aid to people that are in need of it. Bright and Salazar created the club “to spread awareness that the Red Cross isn’t just about donating blood because that’s what many people think; it’s about helping out [those affected by] natural disasters and helping veterans.” The club will do community service alongside the Red Cross, but one of the representatives of the club said “there will also be some times where we’ll do community service ourselves, like going to the food bank and volunteering. This is not related to the Red Cross, but it’s still providing aid to those in need.” They meet every Friday at lunch in I-7. Joining this club is a great way to make a difference all around the world.
It takes a lot of work to create and manage a club. We hope that a lot of students will participate in these unique clubs this year.