By Celia Block ’20

It’s like the week of halloween; the hallway outside the cafeteria is buzzing with high school students wound up on sugar.

Staples has over 90 clubs, each of which had their posters lined up during club rush to brag about what their club has to offer. Piles of candy were thrown across the tables, anything that would get people to put their names down on the sign-up paper placed in front of every station.

The ultimate goal is to get people to join your club, and what better way to do so than have a huge pile full of candy for anyone who signs up to take. The better the candy selection, the more people the station attracts.

This brings up the question of whether having candy at one’s station attracts people who just want the candy, or people who actually want to join the club. I think that if you want the most people to join your club, you should definitely invest in the idea of providing candy at your station.

Almost all the clubs have candy at their stations, but there are a few who don’t, and a few who think it attracts the wrong people.

“People a lot of times will just sign up for candy […] we only want people who are interested in the clubs,” Anna Ehli ’18, president of the Tight Knit Community, said.

On the other hand, candy is delicious, and if it attracts people to your station, it gets them reading about your club. Therefore, isn’t there a higher chance they might actually want to be apart of it?

“They sign up [and] they get the email, which is better than not having them sign up at all,” Ben Gross ’20 said.

Gross makes an excellent point: candy attracts people. More people looking at your station, learning about your club and writing their name down increases the chances of them joining the club.

There are always many kids walking around looking at the stations. I was curious to see why people go to club rush, whether for the candy, the chance to talk to some friends, or actually sign up for a club.

“Candy. Straight up candy,” Holden Cohen ’20 said.

Overall, I think it is beneficial to have candy at your station because it reels people in, even if it may cause some useless names written on a sign-up sheet. And you never know, maybe some of those people will change their minds and actually join the club.

Photos and graphic by Celia Block ’20