Today was a club fair day that was held during lunch at the gym for high school students. With approximately 35 club establishment applications, the gym was buzzing with excitement and chatters.

As the other club executive members lived far away from school and had to take a school bus, I was the only available member that was able to come to school early to help set up our booth.

The picture above is the display we put up for our booth. On this board are the numerous experiments we conducted, all the afterschool volunteering we did, our field trips, and our competition that we held last year — ACS SCI-COMP!

Honestly, I was extremely nervous for today as I imagined that the students, like last year, would probably evade our booth and wince at the title of “chemistry”. Therefore, when students approached our booth today, I especially tried to attract them by an experiment we hosted during our booth.

Called the Milk Fireworks experiment, the experiment itself is extremely kid-friendly and only requires a few simple kitchen materials, such as milk, plates, q-tips, soap and food coloring.

Methodology of Milk Fireworks:

1. First, pour some milk onto a plate so that the bottom of the plate fills up (can pour just a slight amount)
2. Then, add a few drops of food coloring on the center of the dish. The food coloring should not diffuse so quickly yet.
3. Then, dip a q-tip into some dish soap, and then dip the wet end of the q-tip onto the center of the food coloring. The soap’s atomical structure should cause the food coloring to immediately spread out, like fireworks.

This was the experiment we conducted. Although there were a few instances in which we spilt some of the colored milk after the experiments finished over the desk and some even on the display, the experiment was successful at catching students’ and teachers’ attention.

Because of the excited exclamations, our booth crowded up in an instant. Soon enough, all four of us (the executives) were busy running to get more paper towels, were guiding the students to conduct their own the milk fireworks experiment, quizzing people with basic chemistry-related knowledge and explaining the club itself.

I got to admit, our club was the most active and engaged club booth amongst the other 34 clubs in the gym. Although the other club booths’ displays were astonishing, even the other executives agreed that the club executives-to-student engagement was much less than our club, which was continuously buzzing of excitement.

I really want to thank our club executives, and I cannot express how proud I am to be one of their teammates. Although I do have the position of the President, I strongly believe a leader isn’t someone who dominates the team but rather someone who supports the team from the bottom like the trunk of a tree so that the other members can show their full potential and branch out like the branches of the tree.

I was extremely moved by one of the club members, especially. Won-Jun, our treasurer, initially joined our club as a very shy student who avoided eye contact and just sat and watched. Even when we greeted him in the hallways, he would try to slightly wave back but would still look at the wall. Now, he is one of the more active members of our club and even states that our club honestly was one of the most hard working clubs of last year. And I agree.

I’m just so thankful for Won today for these three reasons:

1. Compared to his shy personality last year, he really showed a change in his personality to really step up and be more proactive in promoting our club. I could really notice the flicker of ambition in his eyes today, which was a completely new change.
2. As we each assigned roles on what to bring for today’s booth, Won had forgotten to bring the paper plates. Thankfully enough, I did bring a few extra of each material just in case, and I assured him this morning that he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Yet, he still went down from the 4th floor to the basement cafeteria, borrowed a lunch bowl from the cafeteria ladies, and ran back up to the 5th floor as an act of an apology but also replace the missing paper plates. I was extremely moved by his compassion and generosity.
3. During band, we were asked a prompt of what subject would we teach if we became teachers. Won, who initially did not show much interest at the beginning of last year, proudly stated that he wanted to genuinely become a chemistry teacher. I felt extremely proud that ACS was able to motivate him in such a positive way.

I would also like to thank Toni, who was extremely active in her trivia quizzing activity. She even walked around the entire gym, enthusiastically trivia-ing students as an exchange for free candy if they answered 3 questions correctly.

Also, I was very shocked by what our club executives thought of ourselves when they were explaining to the new guests. When one guest asked about what our club did and what we were successful at last year, I was surprised that Toni and Won both answered simultaneously that, “despite being one of the smallest clubs to exist last year with only 4 members remaining at the end of the second semester, no other club can outweigh the bond we’ve built together as the 4 of us through our activities. There also is no other club that has tried their best to really actively engage with the community while passionately carrying out club activities.”

I was glad that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way but I felt extremely proud and happy that I was able to help the other club executives feel more interconnected with each other, and I attribute these feelings of connectedness possibly to our field trips and the various moments of overcoming hardships that we encountered last year with our experiments and competition planning.

I WAS EXTREMELY HAPPY that students who had previously visited our club booth ran back to our booth after all their display observations to ask when our club was being held, the location details, and they all were extremely interested in signing up for our club as their first choice!!!

The college counselor was also amazed at our club’s proactiveness and the quite efficient schedule we kept up last year with all our events, despite being a new, and quite small club. She liked our Milk Fireworks experiment, and was interested in it because she was able to conduct it with her son.

She also suggested some extremely great ideas(since our club was mainly focused with the vision of helping students approach Chemistry in a friendly way) for our club for the upcoming year…

These are just a few:

• uploading educational tutorial videos of easy-to-do-at-home, kid friendly experiments from our club every month or so and sharing the video with the community around us
• opening up a Saturday session for faculty kids and the faculty staff as a parent-to-child activity
• connecting with the other ACS chapters in Korea and possibly holding a seminar altogether on how we can better express our passion for chemistry
• holding a contest for student parents and the student for whoever films the best video tutorial of a kid-friendly experiment(all will be given the same experiment to film)

YEEK! I’m so excited!!

I cannot wait for the new school year to officially begin with clubs!!

So many students really enjoyed our activities. Oh! And also, our Youtube channel also increased by 5 more subscribers!!!

I’m so excited for the upcoming year.

– Joanna Kim, Sept. 8th, 2021. 12:38AM-