It would be depressing to graduate from Stuyvesant and realize that you’ve left nothing behind except for your initials on a desk and an anarchy sticker in your junior year locker. This is usually not the case because, inadvertently or not, we all strive to make a legitimate place for ourselves in high school. Through sports and academic teams, or various clubs and organizations, each of us has an opportunity to leave behind a legacy, no matter how small.

The individual impacts we have in school are usually made through the extracurricular activities we are involved in. But in order for our impacts to last and continue to flourish after we graduate, it is up to the members of the grades below us to uphold the activities we took part in.

Established teams and service organizations like ARISTA, Big Sibs, and Key Club are almost guaranteed to continue thriving because they are already established in the Stuyvesant community. But it is more difficult, unfortunately, to keep smaller clubs active from year to year. Clubs offer diverse opportunities to the student body and make as important a mark on Stuyvesant’s history as larger organizations do. As a major part of the multitude of extracurricular activities offered, and a source of our school spirit, independent clubs must continue to prosper.

Last year’s seniors left us with school spirit duties to fulfill as part of their legacy. We were bestowed the duty as the new generation of Woopegsooie supporters, Stuycom managers, Broken Escalator editors, Roller Hockey Club presidents, and preservers of other groups. However, it is difficult to maintain the original fervor of a group when you do not feel the same attachment to it as its founders. Some successors of clubs are merely incompetent and do not know how to successfully take control. They either change the fundamentals of the group or cannot make sufficient changes on their own. Because of this uncertainty, the fate of many clubs is seen as sporadic at best.

Stuycom.net, an online Stuyvesant community originally intended to display satirical school information with extra features like blogs and pictures, has remained an underground sensation for the past two years. The highlights of the site are stalking Crushlists, seeing how many people got into Harvard the previous year, and voting in the occasional either/or poll in which hot freshman girls were once exploited. The Web site was founded by Josh Weinstein (’05) and was frequently visited by the student body. Now it is run by a group of male “frenemies” who mimic the bombastic writing style of their predecessors. As the quality of Stuycom diminishes, the future of it is fairly predictable—ownership by another group of smug personalities.

Like Stuycom, another satirical media outlet that has an increasingly dismal future is The Broken Escalator—Stuyvesant’s version of The Onion. A publication that used to be published several times a year in 2005-2006, it was published only once last year because the staff could not get their witty acts together.

Although long-running Stuyvesant traditions such as these are inconsistent, newer ones with more optimistic futures have been created. Woopegsooie, the official athletic booster club, founded last year, garnered immense school spirit in a short amount of time. And they had cool t-shirts. It is still active now (even with a new, less-flashy, t-shirt design), and has a promising future, since the club has the potential to deliver the much-needed school spirit that the student body lacks.

Similarly, the Rowing and Roller Hockey Clubs, founded three years ago and last year, respectively, are incredibly innovative and have dedicated members. While the Rowing club meets weekly during the rowing season to practice on the Hudson River, the Roller Hockey club strives to raise money for charity via roller hockey tournaments. These clubs add to the dynamic of the Stuyvesant athletic community, and demonstrate a renewed sense of school pride.

As the current upperclassmen attempt to maintain the leadership positions that have been handed to them, they also create new clubs that show potential for the future. Service clubs such as The Dream School Foundation Club (which raises money improve education in India) and Music Saves Lives (which donates money raised by playing music to charity) were created this year, but have noble enough causes to be successful in the future. Another club that has gained a strong backing already is SHR: Stuy High Riders, a club for biking enthusiasts. Along with a multitude of other clubs, these clubs show that the drive to maintain legacies at Stuyvesant continues.

Though smaller clubs, publications, and whatever one would call Stuycom are often taken for granted, they’re the organizations that best display the quirkiness and spirit of the student body. It is our duty to pursue not only our own legacies and form our own clubs, but to continue the activities students before us tried to sustain.

We cannot allow the majority of our clubs to become inactive and eventually defunct, like the Cheese Club. And we should not let good concepts for a club, like the Feminist Society, go to waste because of lack of commitment (prior to this year’s club/pub fair, the president of the Feminist Society was not aware she was president, because her male friend was too insecure to be cited as the founder and he put down her name on the form instead). If club and other groups’ members were as equally active as they are in established teams, then the eclectic interests of the student body could effectively be displayed, and there would not only be an active student population in the present, but in the future as well.