Trying On Futures in Public

The school club fair is supposed to be about signing up for activities, but it also feels like everyone is walking through a hallway of possible selves.

Every table is technically advertising a club, with posters, candy, QR codes, sign-up sheets, and people trying to make their activity sound fun in the ten seconds they have before someone keeps walking, however underneath all of that, every table is also selling an identity.

Future lawyer, activist, artist, athlete, service kid, STEM kid, theater kid, finance kid, environmental kid, the person who is always organizing something, the person who is going to save the world, the person who already seems to know exactly who they are.

That is what makes the club fair feel anthropological to me, since it is not just a list of extracurriculars, it is a social map of the school, showing what kinds of identities are available, which ones seem popular, which ones feel intimidating, and which ones people approach only when their friends are not watching.

I notice this even more because I am involved in clubs that are directly connected to identity and the future. As founder and president of the Career Counseling Club, I have worked with the Career Counseling Center to create a space where students can actually think about what careers they might want to pursue, instead of just picking something because it sounds impressive, and we have done symposiums, group activities, and events where students can hear from people in different fields and imagine what those paths might actually look like. So far, about a hundred students have signed up, which tells me that a lot of people are interested in their futures, even if they do not always know how to talk about them.

I am also vice president of the Law Club, where we bring in speakers from the community to talk about law, careers in law, and bigger questions about justice and reform. I think part of why I like that club is because law is not only about being a "future lawyer," it is also about how people argue, protect, punish, defend, organize, and decide what fairness means, and a law club table might look like it is just for people who want to be attorneys, but really it can open up much larger conversations about power and society.

That is the strange thing about club fair identities, they are useful, but they can also become limiting. Some students walk up to a table and instantly say, "I'm not a STEM person," or "I'm not really a theater person," or "I could never do law," and it is interesting how quickly we decide which versions of ourselves are allowed. Sometimes people reject an activity before they even try it, not because they actually dislike it, but because they do not think it fits the person they believe they are supposed to be.

At the same time, the club fair can also be a place where people experiment, someone joining a service club because their friend dragged them there and realizing they care about community work, someone going to one speaker event and suddenly seeing a career they never considered, or someone signing up for a club just for the snacks and ending up finding a part of themselves they did not know was there.

That is what I think adults sometimes miss about extracurriculars, they can look like résumé boxes from the outside, but from the inside, they are often identity labs and students are testing things, asking, "could I be this kind of person?" "do I belong with these people?" "does this topic make me feel more awake?" "is this actually mine, or am I just doing it because it sounds good?"

The Career Counseling Club was partly created for that exact reason, since not everyone knows what they want to do when they are sixteen or seventeen, and honestly, I am not sure we should pretend that we do. Sometimes the most important thing is not choosing one perfect path immediately, but learning how to ask better questions about who you are becoming.

So when I look at the club fair now, I do not just see tables, I see a whole culture of students trying on futures in public. Some people walk away with a sticker or a piece of candy and others walk away with a tiny clue of who they may become.