Blog Post No. 2: Tip of the Roller Coaster

    If you’ve ever been on a rollercoaster, you’ll know what the slowest, most nerve-racking, least-fun part is—the ride up.

    When the ride starts, you’re full of anticipation and ready to scream your head off. As the ominous clicking starts, you can feel butterflies in your stomach accumulating into a frenzy.

    Halfway up, you’re still excited, but the butterflies are starting to disappear, and you’re getting a little bored. 

    Well, it turns out that starting a club is like the middle part of the ride up—you want to be excited…but it’s honestly kinda boring.

    But if you want the ride down, you need to be willing to make the trip up. So these past weeks, I’ve been putting in the effort to get this club going, inching myself closer and closer to the fun part.

    First, I had to figure out the basics—a hosting teacher, when the meetings would happen, and how I was going to get members.

    I emailed a bunch of teachers (look at the PLN page for more details), and convinced the wonderful Ms. Nguyen to be our host. We agreed on Wednesdays after school for the meetings and all that was left to do was making a poster and announcement with all the information to get people interested.

    So I spent about 2 hours creating a poster that looks like it was thrown together in 10 minutes, made a sign-up form, wrote an announcement, and sent it all to Ms. Nguyen. She printed the posters for me to put up next to the billions of others covering the off-white school walls, and I waited for the Google Form notifications to come rolling in. 

    And waited.

    And waited some more.

    No sign-ups.

    This is was my worst nightmare—nobody wanted to join my club! I could see it already—the day of the first meeting rolls around and it's just me and my best friend who's too nice to leave.

    But what I failed to remember was, this was high school. And high schoolers love three things—staying up late, waking up late, and procrastinating (pretty much just procrastinating).

    So after a week of my sign-up form showing "0 responses", I finally got the email I had been waiting for. Someone had signed up!

    And then another.

    And another!

    So with a whole week to go before the first meeting, I have a strong membership of 6 people (considering my school, it's a miracle)!

    And now, it's finally starting to feel like the gleefully anticipated, dreaded tip of the roller coaster. 

    

    You stop seeing track, the clicking stops, and there’s nothing but silence and clouds around you, your butterflies are as out of control as your kid brother on a sugar high, your arms are raised into the air before you can even tell them to, and you’re ready for the ride of your life.

    Turns out, you can worry as much as you want about something, but it can't make the situation any better, and it certainly doesn't it help you. All I had to do was be patient, sit back, and let my work pay off. 

    The club hasn't even started and we've already learned something new! 

                                                                                                                                                                          Hopefully, I'll have some funny, helpful stories from the first meeting by the next post. But until then, stay safe, work hard for what you want, and don't stress about what you can't change. 💜