Lingyuan's blog

I started a club at my high school about Machine Learning this year. I am very excited since Machine Learning is something I’ve recently gotten really interested in, and I hope that through creating this club I will be able to meet other students at my school with similar interests.
Firstly, this event came about when talking to one of my new friends, an incoming sophomore at my school. I met him a few days after the start of the school year, and we ended up bonding over our shared experience in coding, namely USACO. Over the following weeks we spent a lot of time discussing USACO, competitive coding and other STEM related tops and somehow arrived on the topic of Machine Learning. While we discussed the topic, he shared that he always found Ai’s like ChatGPT and other Machine Learning applications to be very cool and wanted to learn more about them at some point. Up until now this conversation has left a great impression on me, as it is the first time I had met someone I knew who was also interested in Machine Learning, even if he had not started learning about it yet. Over the next few days, I would notice that he was not alone in this interest, and that interest in ai, just like the industry itself, had been rapidly growing among my very generation. Thus, led to the idea of a Machine Learning Club where people could develop and share their interests in Machine Learning together.
This idea took root around September 16th, and it was at that time that I started looking into club creation at my school. This process turned out to be more complex than I realized, requiring finding a club advisor, several initial members, drafting a club constitution, and a lot of communication with the Community Life Director at my school. Coincidentally, the school’s annual club fair would be around September 20th, making for a very tough deadline. During those four days, I talked to many of my friends and acquaintances, rounding up three other equally enthusiastic friends to form my club’s administrative body, convincing my CS school’s CS teacher to act as my club’s faculty advisor, and all the other annoying but necessary processes to cub creation. Finally, on the night of September 19th, I had finished all the processes in the nick of time, as well as the club sign for the club fair the next day.
On the day of the club fair, I proudly stood along with my vice-president and two managers with the 40 something other clubs at my school. I did not forget to join a few clubs of my own, such as the TSA Club and Math Club. In the end we got 22 people to join, not counting administration. This is a lot of people especially considering this is our first year.
Over the next few weeks up to now, I have sent out many emails as well as a survey to the club members and will be having our first event very soon. Perhaps I should have expected it, but a large majority of the students that joined have minimal experience in machine learning or coding, which I think will prove a challenge. However, I am very excited to have found so many interested peers and look forward to teaching everyone about machine learning, and eventually collaborating on projects together in the future!