"A legacy is a beautiful thing, but only if it survives." — A random CBS ad that caught my attention

Clubs are the primary way students get that initial experience they can build up into an internship. With the industry becoming more competitive, people try to participate in as many clubs as possible to beef up their resumes, a term I'd like to call "clubmaxxing." While this seems sensible for anyone trying to break into the market, there's a specific group of people who take the hit for it: club leaders. The people who have put their hearts and souls into building communities and opportunities for the next generation, only to watch people come in, maximize, and leave.

The question starts to linger. Will the community they grew with blood, sweat, and tears just end? Or will it be impactful enough to leave a legacy for future generations?

These leaders are now watching people treat clubs as a line item. Something to say they were a part of without actually participating, or in application-based cohorts, not even doing what they signed up to do.

What This Is Doing to Clubs

The impact is real. Application-based clubs are seeing participation drop off, with more and more instances of "I'm sick, can't make it for the next week or two" or "I'm busy, can't come" or just... nothing. No message. They stop showing up entirely.

That last one probably hurts the most, and I can relate. It's rough seeing a cohort of 35-40 people, kept intentionally small to make the experience better, with 5 people absent, another 5-7 leaving early, and 10 more doomscrolling or quietly waiting for it to be over so they can go home and scroll in bed.

Even clubs that used to have amazing numbers and unique perspectives seem dead in comparison over the last 3 months compared to the fall. All the clubs I used to look up to, and the leaders that inspired and motivated me to change my own leadership style, now face the same issue I do, and they changed nothing. If anything, they became more passionate about what they were doing.

At Eat Together, we had to cancel our cohort program because we didn't have enough people sign up in the first place, compared to previous years where we were rejecting almost 50% of applicants. Mentoring CSEED in the fall versus this quarter feels very different, and the only thing that seems to have changed is the passion from the people doing it.

And the worst part? People who do this don't feel guilty at all. Which, honestly, makes sense. This behavior shows up everywhere: group projects, workplace politics, the whole quiet quitting wave from a couple years back. It's become normalized, and that's what makes it hard to push back on.

This is more of the club leader perspective, but let's look at the other side and dive into why this is bad from a student's perspective too.

The Downsides of Clubmaxxing (From a Student's Perspective)

It dilutes your resume. If you're listing Software Engineer or Quantitative Analyst at three different clubs by the end of sophomore year, something's off. Are you filling your experience section with resume slop with no impact, no substance, just titles?

It undermines the people who are actually committed. If you're one of the few who genuinely pours yourself into one or two clubs and sticks with them, clubmaxxing devalues that. When everyone has the same line items, the ones who actually did the work get lost in the noise.

The connections you make don't go anywhere. Clubs used to be the best place to genuinely network, not just exchange LinkedIns and Instagrams to never look at them again. You used to find people willing to leetcode grind with you, work on projects together, and connect on a deeper level. Those genuine connections used to actually get you places. Now? Not as much. Networking has become about hitting 500 connections as fast as possible and fishing for referrals rather than getting to know anyone. There are people who have asked the same officers for their LinkedIn multiple times to "connect" without realizing they've already met.

You lose out on experiences that would actually make you useful at work. When I started at Eat Together, I took down prod with one function while trying to build the photo gallery that now stores all my food pictures. The 5 hours I spent in the depths of that codebase, actually understanding what broke and why, changed the way I approach building products to this day. You can't shortcut your way out of breaking something real. You have to understand what you built. That's the kind of thing you only get when you're in deep enough to actually mess something up.

Is AI Part of the Problem?

I think yes, to an extent.

The growth of large language models has had a massive impact on the industry, and I think it's quietly reshaped club culture too. AI lets people churn out projects at a scale we've never seen before. Something like Eat Together, a project that's been in development for over four years, could probably be built in a weekend now, and that's being generous. Those projects then get packaged with AI-optimized resume templates, leading to serious exaggeration. A huge chunk of the applicant pool now reads like a mid-level IC with five-plus years of experience. Everyone looks the same.

The result? Projects are becoming less meaningful. And because of that, the resume focus at the college level needs to shift toward something more AI-proof, something more human, and that's exactly where clubs come in. Combined with growing market demand for leadership as a skill, the optimized play is starting to converge on one thing: actually leading something.

Here's the other side of it though. AI genuinely lets students do more. Things like setting up a payment system or a database, which used to take beginners ages, now take 10-15 minutes. My own GitHub contribution chart tells that story. I went all in on agentic workflows this year and the difference is visible, not just in how much code I've pushed, but in the scope of what I'm building. I went from simple web apps like a bingo card for places on the Ave to a full computer vision-based AI badminton coach. AI has raised the floor so much that the ceiling became invisible.

And that's exactly why people stop seeing the point in project-based clubs. When you can build anything yourself in a weekend, the club project stops feeling like a reason to show up. So they stay for the name on the resume and coast, which is just clubmaxxing with extra steps.

My Appeal to University Students

Yes, AI has changed the way we work. But has it really gotten to a point where we've lost our basic sense of accountability?

Whatever happened to just respecting the people around you? To honoring a commitment you made?

All I'm asking is that we be more appreciative of our student leaders. Show up to meetings. Actually do the work that was asked of you. Honor your commitments, and more importantly, if you know you can no longer commit, it's okay to say so and step back. Anyone who has done that with Eat Together, acknowledging that they don't have enough time to make a meaningful contribution and actually communicating it, has honestly earned a newfound level of respect from me.

It keeps the door open for them if they want to come back. It also takes the weight off leaders who are already questioning whether it's something they're doing wrong every time someone disappears without a word.

If that doesn't happen, club leaders may be forced into a harsher approach, and I don't think anyone likes that. I had to do it once with Eat Together's strategy team and it was one of the most gut-wrenching decisions I've made as a leader, cutting people just so the rest of the team could breathe again. I'd do it again if I had to. But I'd rather not have to.

Showing up and communicating is the small step, from each one of us, that makes the larger impact possible.