At their first meeting of the year, on Sept. 12, Science National Honor Society announced the new way that the club would implement lab activities: monthly themes.

Monthly themes allow the club to focus an area of science in depth for their bi-weekly Monday meetings. SNHS meets every other Monday, and it tries to encompass all forms of science. Their goal this year is to get new members and maintain member retention, according to co-president senior Ruoyun Zheng.

Zheng and co-president senior Catherine Yi came up with “monthly themes” this year as a way to attract new members and work towards the club’s original goal. According to SNHS activities manager Grace Luo, SNHS’ labs used to be based off of random topics and focused too heavily on biology and chemistry. Luo explained that with the new method members could more easily choose which meetings they’d be interested in going to — if someone was interested in meteorology or chemistry, they could check which month those subjects would fall under instead of attending labs for subjects they are not interested in.

“[Monthly themes] make us more responsible,” Luo said. “With themes you want to build on different subjects — if you want to learn a concept, you aren’t just jumping around from one thing to another — you are trying to build on your knowledge and explore the subject in a deeper sense.”

This month, SNHS will focus on chemistry, with their first lab of the year on candy chromatography. Chromatography is a common science practice used to separate a mixture by running it through a medium which the components move at different rates. By analyzing how candy dye moves on the chromatography paper, students, according to Luo, will have a fun and engaging access to STEM fields.   

Public relations officer junior Niveda Balemurughan hopes to improve club to member communications by emailing and updating more frequently.“We chose chromatography first because it involves candy so it is attractive to new members,” Luo said. “Also it is not as daunting since it is just a chemistry lab, not too heavily mathematics and is more hands on — we want to be more welcoming on our first meeting.”

“Monthly themes exist so we can truly become a science club,” Balemurughan said. “We can cover more fields of science that people at MVHS do not have as much access too. They allow our members to explore different fields that could interest a completely different set of people.”