One man's trash by Benjamin

One man's trash by Benjamin - September 2019 Scholarship Essay

One of the main goals of high school is to show students the many possibilities of the world and how they want to explore it. Extracurriculars are a big part of this as they give students the ability to explore not only various passions they may have, but also teach them how to interact with others and experience the thrill of working towards a common goal. Most schools have enough extracurriculars to cover any interest from sports, to competitions, to relaxing clubs focused on art or music. Yet some interests and passions are still criminally unexplored, and many students fail to realize their interest in the subject due to never having the opportunity to experience it. For this reason, I believe there should be a garage sale club.
I know it sounds dumb, but hear me out. The idea of re-selling and attempting to make a profit is something many people find incredibly fun and would lend itself to a unique extracurricular that nothing else can really match. For the general idea that I have in my mind, I would imagine a club featured around a contest that has around 3 different elements. The first element would involve the students donating a small amount of money and holding fundraisers for the first 2 to 3 months of school to help raise money for the club. They could do this in a few ways such as bake sales, or volunteering with organizations with a donation bin to help fund the club. Once the club hits it’s funding goal for the year the real competition can begin. The main body of the competition would focus on students in teams bringing in objects to host their very own “garage sales” around the school that the general student body can buy things from or that they can barter for. The contents of the garage sale would be made up of objects that the students would buy using the money raised earlier, and would allow the students to make up themed shops for their sales. The students would then compete to try and make the most money off of their stores and attempt to continue to hunt at local garage sales for more products that they could sell. After a set amount of time, the money is added up and a winner is determined with the proceedings being donated partly to the school, and the bulk going to finance the next sale.
I think this would be a really interesting idea for a few reasons, but the primary one that I want to focus on the spirit of entrepreneurship it offers. This club would offer the ability to create a new type of experience that really isn’t something you can experience at most schools. It would allow students to get more in touch with their ability to sell objects as well as teach skills such as how to recognize good deals and how to recognize trends, in order to find what the student body will want and what they will be able to make a profit with. By framing it as a contest it would also be possible to expand the club and hold multiple different contests with variations on the rules and what is allowed to make the games more interesting as well as to add prizes and incentive new members to join.
Through this club, I hope to show the value of entrepreneurship as well as make a school-wide event that encourages participation on different levels from those in the club as well as those who are just observing it. I know it sounds like a strange and out of their idea, but schools are filled with normal by the books clubs, and I feel this would be a great way to throw in something a little more off the walls. Something like this would challenge the standard idea of what a club is and still provide useful real-world benefits for those who participate in it allowing it to hopefully catch the interest of those who don’t participate in normal standard clubs. By making this club so unique and different hopefully, people who don’t like the standard structure of most clubs will be intrigued enough to check this one out and give this new take on the idea of clubs a try.
For these reasons, I would create a garage sale club if I was given the chance to make on extracurricular. Well, I don’t think it follows the standard pattern for a club, I think the uniqueness of the concept will help to not only gain traction and be seen as an interesting and engaging activity that can recruit people who don’t normally go to clubs.