The box I left blank

The application to start the Digital Design Club at Dulles came back rejected. Not because of the idea, and not because of the sponsor. Because of one empty box on the form.

The box asked for the club's officers. I had left it blank.

Why it was blank

At my middle school I ran the club myself. I wrote the lessons, I made the poster, I ran every meeting, I graded the final competition against a rubric I had written. There were no officers because there did not need to be any. It worked for a year that way.

So when the Dulles form asked for officers, I read it as optional. It is not. A district wants to see that a club is a structure rather than one person, and it wants names attached to it before it will approve anything.

A club that only works because one specific person is running it is not a club yet. It is that person doing a lot of work.

That is a fair thing for them to check. It is also the exact thing I had not built, because doing it all myself was working.

What I did about it

Profe De La Cruz agreed to sponsor the club, and he showed the recruitment video to his class so people would know it existed. I put the application back in with the parts that were missing.

I find out on Tuesday.

What I actually learned

The rejection was not about whether the club was any good. Seventy-one people applied to the first one. It was about whether it could survive without me, and I had never once been asked that question before.

Doing everything yourself is the fastest way to get something off the ground and the slowest way to make it last. Those are not the same goal, and last year I only needed the first one.

This is the first thing I have written here. Notes get added to these pages later, in the margin, dated, so you can see what I thought at the time and what I think now. This one has none yet, because it is new.