When asked to name aspects of my personality, creativity would not be the first one to come to mind. In elementary school, try as I might to be the best artist, I never was. Instead of crisply drawn portraits, mine came out wildly inaccurate and sloppy. Try as I might, I simply wasn’t the best at it. It wasn’t until my high school yearbook class that I realized I actually was creative. My creativity was not bound to pencil and paper but instead flourished on yearbook spreads and social media graphics. Yearbook and journalism have transformed not only the way I view myself but also taught me many valuable lessons, like determination, time management, and hard work.
I took my first newspaper class in seventh grade and fell in love. Interviews were an invigorating process, pulling people out of class to talk. Taking photos became a quick favorite too. I could walk into a room with a badge and be given permission to capture whatever moment was in front of me. My love for designing came later but it was in that seventh-grade newspaper class that my love for capturing moments in journalism began.
Being a younger sister, practically the entirety of my early life was spent following my older sister around and imitating her every move. When I was in sixth grade, she took her first yearbook class and also fell blissfully in love with it. She was named editor in chief her junior year. What originally began as a normal duty turned haywire when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. My sister and her best friend and co-editor were then tasked with finishing up the yearbook while at home. Since no one else had the same editing software, they had to finish each page that had not yet been completed. I was immediately at their disposal, dying to help, and at their credit, they gave me two pages. One page had already been designed and only needed pictures and captions plugged in. I worked hard picking out the right pictures and typing up extravagant captions. The next page they gave me came completely empty, it was up to me to figure it out. Looking back now, it is evident the growth that my designing has undergone.
The next year, I entered the yearbook class myself officially as a freshman. As a four-person staff, and the only one not a senior, I spent the year watching my editors and learning the ropes of how to run a publication.
The following year came with its challenges. With a new teacher, the majority of the year was spent doing many things that weren’t yearbook-related. We began the fourth quarter, the final six weeks of school, with a different teacher. It was as our new teacher took over, she realized we only had a mere ten pages complete, the pages I had already completed. She also discovered that we had not even secured a publisher for the year. Those last six weeks were crunch time for me and my staff. My new teacher, select members of the class, and I poured ourselves into the remaining pages for the last few weeks, working on pages during every free moment. Miraculously, we finished by our deadline. With our new advisor’s help, we secured our previous publisher and had our final draft sent in with barely any time to spare.
The next year, we were given an entirely new staff. By the end of the year, while most pages possessed some degree of content, they were in need of heavy editing. My advisor, my gracious boyfriend and I would come in during the early summer days and edit for hours upon end. Just like the year before, we got the publication turned in within our deadline.
This year, I am working to get our publication edited and published before the start of summer and my graduation. I am training up our next line of editors and teaching them all the nuances of our design program. This year and last year, I also helped to produce athletic updates in our school newsletters, which are sent out to families school-wide weekly. This not only has provided me the opportunity to increase my writing skills but also forced me to better my time management, turning in each update within a specific time each Friday afternoon.
Upon graduation, I plan on becoming an elementary school student at a school similar to the one I am attending now. Not only am I equipped with the skills of designing graphics, but even deeper I will be able to more effectively communicate with parents the thrilling things we are learning in our class week by week.
Our yearbook class has taught me lots of things. Not only have I grasped a further understanding of creative design, but it has also taught me to get along and work with people. With countless rotating staff members and three different advisors over my four years, I have learned to adapt to different people’s working styles and work alongside each of them to create a cohesive yearbook publication. I have also learned how to lead a team to reach a goal as editor-in-chief. It has been my job over the past few years to teach each new member of the class how to design their spreads as well as the key aspects of photography. Finally, being in yearbook and journalism has taught me a love for capturing special moments. What a joy it is to be able to produce a book of people’s fondest memories from elementary, middle, and high school.