Formation in Disguise: How Clubs & Activities Shape the Whole Person at SLUH

By Chris Buerke '09

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One of the best teachers I ever had — Mr. Chuck Hussung, who taught me freshman English more than 20 years ago and is still teaching at SLUH today — has managed to turn a bad Wikipedia habit into a classroom game that he calls “WikiRaces.”

The rules are simple. Start on a random page, striving to reach a target page by clicking only on the blue links in between. As an example, you might start on “SpongeBob SquarePants” with the eventual goal of landing on “World War II.”

There's the fast route: SpongeBob → Bikini Bottom → Bikini Atoll → nuclear testing → World War II. Four clicks, very efficient. 

But there's also a slower, less direct route, involving eight discerning clicks that force you to wander through the Krabby Patty secret formula, corporate espionage, Navajo codebreaking, Alan Turing and the Enigma machine. Both routes get you there. But only one introduces you to unexpected topics along the way. Why? Because you rarely learn how the world is connected until you click on something, and discover a link you never knew existed.

The only losing move — in both WikiRaces and in most things at SLUH — is never clicking anything at all.

In the growing age of technology, I think this is a fitting way to think about formation, which is the word we use to describe the quiet, often invisible work of growing into the person God is calling you to be. At SLUH, that developing person has a name: the Grad at Grad—a title that involves five characteristics we hope every young man leaves with at graduation: Loving, Religious, Open to Growth, Intellectually Competent, and Committed to Doing Justice.

Formation[:] the word we use to describe the quiet, often invisible work of growing into the person God is calling you to be.

At SLUH, formation does not just take place in class. It's what happens underneath every club, activity, program and experience at SLUH. This year at our annual Activities Fair, our students had more than 100 activities to “click on,” sorted into 11 imperfect categories: 

• Affinity, Culture & Advocacy
• Arts & Creative Media
• Career & Professional Interests
• Faith & Service
• Games & Strategy
• Global Education & Language
• Leadership
• Programs & Experiences
• Special Interest
• Sports, Health & Wellness
• Sustainability

Whichever tables our students stopped at during the Activities Fair—Beekeeping Club, Mock Trial, the Anti-Racist Coalition, Art & Design, and so on—the categories above were useful, but rarely (if ever) the whole story. Alongside every club and activity, the Grad at Grad is actively doing its work. If our clubs had their own Wikipedia pages, the Grad at Grad would almost always be buried somewhere in the links, no matter the category we filed it under.

Here's what that looks like up close.

Prep News: A Deadline (and Real Growth) Every Week

The Prep News, our student-run, weekly printed newspaper, produces roughly ten pages of stories each week — reported, written, edited and laid out entirely by students.

Sure, that effort asks students to be Intellectually Competent: researching, interviewing, tight writing on a deadline that doesn't move. But spend a Thursday night in the Media Center and you'll see something else, too. You'll see a senior editor teaching a sophomore how to structure a lead without crushing his confidence — that's Open to Growth, on both sides. You'll see a story that holds the school itself accountable to its own values — that's Committed to Doing Justice, printed and distributed to the whole building. 

The paper is the deliverable. The formation is everything that happens to produce it.

Global Experiences & Service Trips: Formation Beyond Oakland Avenue

Our 24 global immersion and service trips take students well past Oakland Avenue—into other countries, other parishes, and other people's lives.

Ask a student what he actually remembers from one of these trips, and he rarely leads with the itinerary. He talks about experiencing God somewhere he didn't expect to find Him—in a language he didn't speak, at a meal in someone else's home, on a work site far from anything familiar. That's Religious formation, sneaking aboard the airplane. It's also Committed to Doing Justice in its most literal form. Actual hands, actual labor, actual relationships with people the trip is meant to serve. And, by design, it's Open to Growth, because you can't leave your comfort zone by that much distance and come back unchanged.

BAC & Med Careers: Career Prep That Doubles as Discernment

The Business Administration Club (BAC), under Career & Professional Interests, runs a stock game and brings in founders and financial advisors to talk margins, risk and strategy, as well as the importance of serving the larger world through ethical business practices. Loving? Check. Open to Growth? Check. Intellectually Competent? Check … cash, and card.

Filed under that same category, but built for an entirely different field, is the Medical Careers Club, where physicians, surgeons and nurses talk diagnoses and patient care with students. Ask what actually stays with them, though, and it's rarely the science; it's a visiting doctor's answer to a question about the hard call they were forced to make at 2 a.m. That's Religious formation slipping into a room built for career advice — alongside our students starting to see what it might mean to be called to medicine, not just qualified for it.

Neither club sets out to teach discernment. Both end up doing it anyway.

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Five very different activities, five very different reasons a student might have joined. And that's before you get to the other hundred — the honest dialogue happening inside Ongoing Conversations, the patience being built in Chess Club and Scholar Bowl, the leadership being tested in Student Council, the faith being deepened in Sodality of Our Lady or the Ignatian Service Club, the quiet stewardship of Green Ambassadors and the Energy Team. 

Every group at SLUH is doing far more than its label suggests. Why? Because that's the promise behind all of our activities at SLUH. 

A Jesuit education rooted in Ignatian spirituality will almost always give a young man more than he expects. He signs up for the stock game, the service trip, the robotics competition, or the coffee and donuts — and emerges more fully formed: Loving, Religious, Open to Growth, Intellectually Competent, Committed to Doing Justice. On a level he may not yet know or understand, he clicks on one opportunity and ends up discovering connections he never knew existed, gifts he never knew he possessed, and new ways to set the world on fire.

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About the Author

Chris Buerke '09 is a College Counselor, Junior Class Moderator and Interim Activities Director (2026-27) at St. Louis University High. He previously worked in higher education, copywriting and creative strategy before deciding the halls of SLUH is where he belonged after all. He holds a BS in Linguistics from Truman State University and an MA in Education Administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He believes clubs, activities and everything outside (and inside) the classroom play a big role in helping students grow into leaders, and he's always happy to talk about it.