You hear about clubs at the club fair, but do you know how they were created? Here are the creation stories (or the conspiracy theories of creation stories by the club members) of some of the clubs:

Antares (previously Robot X):

“We cut stuff, we built stuff, and we made a robot, and we named it: Garquavious Arjun Bhobe the 4th Junior” - Shanti P.

The real creation story for Antares wasn’t known by those interviewed, but Shanti theorized, “There once was two students and they were madly in love, but they could never be together…and they really wanted to take revenge on the school because the school was the reason, they could never be together.” They needed a way to damage the school without being too suspicious, which is when they came up with the idea of joining the ‘robotics’ club. The students suggested the name Robot X. Which secretly stood for robot exterminate.

Robot X has worked hard on its covert mission of destroying school property, having destroyed ceiling tiles and pillars.

Another theory proposed anonymously was, “There was a dog and the dog likes robots, so it made a robot team.”

Spanish Honor Society:

“Our first meeting will be next week with our anonymous initiation. I promise there’re no sacrifices guys” - Mira V.

The club began when Cristina wanted to give students an opportunity to go further into Spanish, and contacted a few students including Mira. They created a sector of the Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica at KLS called Casa de Villa. Casa de Villa means ‘House on Villa’, which is a reference to the street KLS is on, but there is also a square in Madrid with the same name.

Leadership Team:

“Students have a lot of power in this school” - anonymous student

“I respect leadership too much to satire about it” - anonymous student

While none of the students interviewed knew the real creation story, the main theory was, “A bunch of people who liked complaining joined a club”.

Mock Trial:

“Alisha is really bent on arguing he kidnapped himself” - Mira V.

Good evening, your honor. I will be introducing you to the creation story of the Mock Trial Club. Mira heard from a friend that he was doing mock trial and thought it was interesting. Creating a mock trial team required coaches, “I spent literally the entirety of ninth grade with emailing [to find coaches]”. Eventually, the city attorney agreed to coach the team, and they participated in the Mock Trial competition!

The club now exists on Mondays from 5:00 to 6:00 with Mira as the captain and Alisha as the co-captain.

Speech and Debate:

“We watched a couple of example speeches and they kind of explained what both speech and debate was, but everyone was kind of getting sugar high [they were given donuts]” - Sparsha S.

Sparsha’s theory for the creation was “I think Vivek woke up and came to school one day and was like: Speech. Debate. Club.”

In reality what happened was pretty similar. Vivek joined the school and was like, ‘There’s no speech and debate club?”. At the same time, Ansh and Krish arrived and had the same reaction. When Vivek proposed the idea of the club, Ansh and Krish agreed to help. They together ran the speech and debate club with Ansh focusing on the debate portion, and Vivek and Krish focusing on speech.

EBI:

“Usually it takes like a solid twenty minutes for everyone in the club to show up and by everyone I mean like six people…actually it’s like ten” - anonymous student.

“Uh yeah everything is secret. We can conclude the–” - anonymous student

Back in covid, around July of either 2020 or 2021, three faculty members Natalie, Michael, and Brandon suggested making a club about addressing social injustices and making KLS better. A few seniors from that time took initiative and created a club, which they called EIJ (Equity, Inclusion, and Justice). They went to SDLC (Student Diversity Leadership Conference) and gained more people. The club has changed a lot since then, as it’s now in person.

“Join EBI, Thursday 4:00 to 5:00” and if you can’t make the timings email ebicouncil@kls.org and they’ll work with you.

Science Journal:

“We’re all just talking about niche scientific–not even scientific–topics that we are interested in learning about…for example, like I want to research lobotomies” - anonymous student

It was created last year, “Sam was like, oh this would be cool”. It began with Sam’s mom and Sam preparing a slideshow every meeting to explain journal articles. As the club expanded, they called over several experts on various subjects to explain journal articles to them.

iGEM:

“For some reason everytime at the lab something happens to go wrong” - Nick H.

Nick heard about iGEM from his dad and was interested in what other teams had done. He tried to start at KLS, which is when he talked to Ansh who offered to help. Together they founded the iGEM team for KLS. Along the way, people from other schools joined, resulting in the iGEM team we have today.

Khranicle:

“It’s since grown, a little bit” - Sita V.

It was before the summer of the 2021 to 2022 school year, when an idea sprung into the minds of those from the leadership team. What if KLS had a student newspaper? Four students, Aruna, Adhya, Maddie, Nunu wrote up a proposal that eventually turned into the school newspaper we know today.

Yearbook:

“We design the yearbook” - anonymous student.

“We have had a yearbook for like ever since the first year of the school”. It used to be a teacher and then a marketing person named Matt who ran the club with a few students helping. Three years ago, it was very student-led with the help of Lejoi.

Then it died for a year.

The year after that, it started late, but eventually got completed due to the work of a few students. This year the club has begun and hopefully by the end an yearbook will exist.

Math Club:

“The universe is a disk” - Kanzah.

In the third term of the year 2022 to 2023, three students ventured into the realm of a yellow-lit building with crooked desks with the chairs glued on. The desks had papers stacked in disheveled piles that edged to the chasm of darkness (aka off the desk). The place they were in was the building of Berkeley for the Berkeley Mini-Math Tournament.

After that experience, they began practicing on whiteboards in evenings on school days, unofficially. But the next year it became official. Introducing the Math Club.

These are just the creation stories of some of the clubs (11 out of over 30). For more information, talk to the leads! They’ll generally have pretty insane stories to tell you.