During my exchange year, I wanted to make friends and be involved so I joined a few afterschool clubs. Right at the start of the school year, my friend Cassie invited me to a meeting of the Mock Trials Club. Learning more about the United States’ judiciary system really piqued my interest and I decided to join the club. The point of the club is to imitate a judiciary trial. Each meeting members would split into two teams, prosecutors and defenders, and they would then persuade the judge and jury to agree with them. I was a part of the prosecutor team and my job was to portray a witness of the crime. I really enjoyed the Mock Trials Club, as there was always an amazing atmosphere among the students and our teachers, who were lawyers, always brought us pizza. Our Mock Trials Club made it all the way to the state championship round, but the tournament was unfortunately cancelled due to the pandemic.
Thanks to the friends I made in the Mock Trials Club, I also found out about a club called InvenTeam. In this club, students had to work together to come up with a solution to a societal problem using technology. I was part of a group of programmers, where we developed an application to control our invention, a monitoring system for water backpacks, and program a control unit for it. We weren’t able to complete our project due to the pandemic, but I really loved this club and have very fond memories of my afternoons there.
Written by Samuel Boor ’20 (Vrbove, Slovakia/La Crosse, WI)
