At MVHS, history is a subject that often gets overlooked as students tend to focus more on STEM related subjects. However, the History, Economics, and Politics club (HEP) attempts to put this stigma to rest by celebrating history every Friday during lunch.

Club presidents and seniors Shawn Lee and Joseph Del Mundo met their sophomore year when they were in the same World Core history class. After a conversation with another friend in the class, the pair decided to start a history club at MVHS, feeling that it was a necessity.

“I checked the club lists to see if there was a history club and was surprised to see there wasn’t,” Lee said. “So we went to our teacher Mr. Owens and said ‘Yo, can you be the advisor to our history club’ and he said ‘Heck yeah, I will’ and so we turned in our forms and made the club.”

Each meeting, the presidents along with head officers seniors Suchita Joshi and Gaurav Datta present and discuss noteable events in history. After, they hold an open discussion that focuses on the implications of those events and then connect it to topics that are relevant today. In addition, the club offers tutoring for students who need help in history — something that Lee wants to emphasize for the upcoming year.

“We want to help out students since we know classes like World Core, Studies and APUSH can get quite difficult and we just want to make a little space for people that are really interested in these subjects just as Chemistry or Biology club does,” Lee said.

While none of the heads of the club see themselves majoring in history, they view the subject as a channel into deepening their understanding of other fields.

“I intern for a machine learning company and we analyze documents, and a lot of time they are from [a] museum. We can use our knowledge of history combined with what we know about machine learning to see what certain patterns are repeating. So even though none of us are majoring in history, we are using our previous knowledge about the world in order to help museums or other people with their data,” Joshi said.  

While the officers have high expectations for their meetings, the club is still in its second year and sees opportunities to grow and expand across campus.

“History is very interesting to me [and] I think it’s one of the most important subjects that you can learn about at school,” Del Mundo said. “You learn about humanity, psychology, philosophy and even some math and statistics if you’re really into that. In the future, we might even do field trips but right now we are just focused on getting more people and spreading our love for history.”