Third quarter might be one of the slowest quarters; it’s filled with snow days and school work. For juniors, they begin to get overloaded with honor society applications. But nothing about these groups seem appealing for me to join, so why should I?

EHS recently introduced math honor society or “Mu Alpha Theta” into the mix and will soon be joined by social studies or “Rho Kappa.” Some other honor societies include art, English, foreign language and even journalism.

Students become very eager around this time to join and even apply to become leaders, but why?

The official National Honor Society website offers many explanation to this question: “Support for students and parents with college admission and financial aid planning, leveraging unique member-only resources and tools, including webinars, virtual events, and scholarship search; an affinity for service, enabling students to make significant contributions to their schools and communities; etc.”

Sure, colleges do look for leadership roles but students tend to stand out more from a more selective group or team. But being in NHS or any other society does not guarantee anything for college.

The official NHS does offer scholarships, but colleges don’t grant scholarships specifically to those in an honor society. National honor society is offered in all 50 states, thus making the scholarships offered hard to achieve.

Generally the acceptance into any of EHS’ honor societies includes service or activity hours; for example, National English Honor Society requires 10 hours of service during a student’s senior year. But if a student joins as many as they can then they might be dealing with 30+ hours.

Usually, the event hours must be an event given by the society and relate to the branch of honor society, but how does that make students want to apply?

It may be liked by some students, but others will trudge along to each event just to get in their hours. I want to enjoy my senior year, not pack my schedule every other weekend.

After a whole year of work, all there is really to show is a chord at graduation and a sentence on a college application. Weighing the value, I don’t think it’s worth it.