Created only last year, New Providence’s Pop Culture Club is off to a great start.

Pop Culture club is a student-led club where students can take a break from their academic environments. During the meetings, members discuss exciting events, such as different movies, dramas, music genres, fashion, award shows, etc.

Shonchori Mukherjee and Gia Pellegrino are the co-Presidents of the club. Mukherjee said: “We started the club to give students an outlet from the strict academic environment.”

The idea of the club came in January 2021, when Mukherjee and Pellegrino realized there aren’t any clubs like this in NPHS.

Mukherjee said: “We both just really liked Pop Culture and wanted to learn more about it, so we decided to start the club to give us a way to speak more about this.”

Ms. Berrios is the Pop Culture club advisor. She agreed to advise the club because of her own love for Pop Culture.

“It’s one of my guilty pleasures, just keeping up with all the news, good and bad. And I just like being with the students and interacting with them, and it’s fun to see them talk about things that aren’t academic,” said Ms. Berrios. 

There were many initial drawbacks in instituting the Pop Culture club. Because of it’s late start in the school year, recruiting members initially was rough. The Club Fair had been held back in September, so there weren’t many ways to convince students to join. 

Also, due to COVID-19, many club meetings had to be on Zoom. This made them mainly discussion based, rather than interactive like Mukherjee and Pellegrino had hoped. 

However, this year, the club has finally started to see real growth and expansion. 

During this past Club Fair, they were able to increase the participants of the club to sixty members. Now, the hopes are to make more engaging meetings for students. 

“We’re trying to incorporate more teams and have more people getting out of their seats with interactive discussions,” Mukherjee said. 

In their monthly meetings, the students prefer to keep a relaxed environment. Pellegrino usually starts the discussion on a certain topic, and other members continue to give their input until the discussion eventually fizzles out. 

In the upcoming months, the club will have meetings watching movies, talking about award shows like the Grammys, and really anything the majority of members are interested in. 

It’s Tanvi Silvester’s first year in the club as a junior, and she said: “I joined the club because it gave me a new way to meet new people. I really like talking about music, and it’s really fun having other people to engage in with that.” 

Although Pop Culture is a “chill” club, it gives students a chance to get a more worldly point of view on the surrounding society and community. 

“Yes, the academic environment is important, but being well versed in things like pop culture and more recreational topics can make a more versatile person,” said Mukherjee.

Pop Culture club is always looking for new members to participate in their discussions.

If interested, students can email Shonchori Mukherjee and Gia Pellegrino: [email protected] and [email protected]