How to Start a Club at Deerfield Academy

Deerfield tells students to start their own club if the one they want does not exist. Here is how that actually works.

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Quick Answer for Busy Parents

Deerfield Academy invites students to found their own clubs, and new ones form every year. The path runs through the Student Activities Office: define a purpose, gather founding members, secure a faculty advisor, and submit a proposal. A club fair each autumn is the main recruiting moment. Deerfield already runs more than sixty student organizations, so the first real task is checking whether your idea already exists in another form.

What Clubs Exist at Deerfield?

Deerfield publishes its club list openly, and reading it is the single most useful thing a prospective founder can do. The range is wide, and much of it is unglamorous in a good way. There is a beekeeping club registered with the Franklin County and Massachusetts Beekeepers Associations. There is a club whose purpose is cutting and braiding hair. There is a satirical newspaper, a Classics journal, a fashion magazine, and a culinary magazine, all separate publications.

If your idea overlaps with something on that list, the stronger move is usually to join and reshape rather than found something parallel. Admission committees and faculty advisors both read a duplicate club as a bid for a title rather than a genuine interest.

Five Steps in Starting a Club at Deerfield

1. Define a purpose narrow enough to be real. A club for people who like science is not a club. A club that fields two Science Bowl teams and runs weekly Science Olympiad event practice is one. Write the purpose as an activity, not a topic.
2. Find people before you find paperwork. Talk to classmates, hold an informal first meeting, and see who turns up twice. A founding group of four committed students beats a sign-up sheet of thirty names.
3. Recruit a faculty advisor who cares about the subject. Every Deerfield club has one. Approach a teacher whose own interests overlap with yours, come prepared with a written plan, and be clear that you are asking for guidance and logistical support rather than someone to run the club for you.
4. Write the proposal. Name, purpose, planned activities, meeting frequency and location, founding members, and advisor. Submit it through the Student Activities Office, which oversees clubs and alliances.
5. Launch at the club fair. Deerfield holds a club fair each autumn and it is the single best recruiting moment of the year. Have something to show, not just a sign-up sheet.

A note on timing. Deerfield requires every student to spend roughly two hours each weekday afternoon on a supervised cocurricular activity, which is separate from clubs. Clubs run around that commitment. A proposal that ignores the cocurricular calendar tends to collapse in November when everyone discovers they cannot attend.

Building a Leadership Record That Holds Up

Founding something is only valuable if it lasts. We help students choose commitments they will still care about in two years.

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What Makes a Proposal Succeed

The clubs that survive at Deerfield share a structural feature: they have a reason to meet. A weekly lesson, a monthly tournament, a publication schedule, a competition calendar. Deerfield’s Chess Club runs weekly lessons and monthly tournaments. Albany Road publishes at least three times a year and hosts coffee houses. Math Club organizes the annual Deerfield Math Competition for regional middle schoolers. Each of those has a rhythm that does not depend on enthusiasm holding steady.

The clubs that fail have a topic and a hope. If you cannot describe what happens at the fourth meeting, the proposal is not finished. Our guidance on starting a club in high school covers the mechanics in more general terms, and building executive function is relevant here for a reason: running a club is an organizational task before it is a leadership one.

Why This Matters for Deerfield Academy Admissions

If you are reading this before applying rather than after enrolling, the useful takeaway is inverted. Founding a club at your current school is not a credential that impresses Deerfield by itself. What reads well is depth and duration: three years in one organization, growing into a role, is a stronger signal than three clubs founded in ninth grade and abandoned. Our piece on the role of extracurriculars in private school admissions makes the case at more length, and showcasing leadership in a boarding school application covers how to write about it without inflating it.

A Final Word

Deerfield says plainly that students who do not see what they want are welcome to start it. That is an unusual amount of institutional permission, and the students who use it well tend to be the ones who first spent a year inside something that already existed.

Talk to Us About the Whole Picture

Clubs are one piece. We work with families on the shape of a student’s years, not the contents of a resume.

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