This week, we sat down with junior Haley Rushing to talk about her efforts in bringing back the Rhodes yearbook.
HerCampus: What made you interested in reviving the yearbook, and how did you find out about it?
Haley Rushing: At my previous college, I was the layout editor for the yearbook. I also want to go into publication design. So, when I transferred here, I wanted to get involved in the same thing, but there wasn’t a yearbook to get involved in! It just kind of happened from there: there wasn’t a yearbook to get involved in, and thankfully there were other students who wanted to get involved in a yearbook as well.
HC: Why do you think it’s important to have a yearbook for college?
HR: I feel like it’s as important in college as much as it is for any other year of your life. I wish you could have yearbooks for every year of your life, even after school! It’s just a good way to document the things that happened that year. Even now, as a junior in college, I still go back and look at my middle school yearbooks and think how crazy it is that we once looked like that or dressed like that, and so having that sort of memento, especially at this point in life, is very needed.
HC: As someone who sort of oversees the whole operation, what sort of things go into making a yearbook?
HR: Most of what I’ve done so far, especially last semester, is basically a lot of prep work. I’ve had to talk to our publisher, work with their representative, just sort of get everything together with that. We’ve had to pick out a theme, page numbers, the number of books that we need, organize the staff. In terms of what we’ve had to do with Rhodes, each organization has to make its own constitution, so we’ve done that, too. It’s been a lot of prepatory work, but I’m really glad that now we’re in the stage where we actually get to create it.
HC: What have been some challenges so far?
HR: I think picking out a theme, color scheme, and visually what we’re going to go with. Some days I look at it and think it’s really good, and some days I onder if we should have gone with something else. Basically, it’s been challenging picking, visually, what goes best with the theme of the yearbook.
HC: What is the theme this year?
HR: Back to Square One! We felt like that was a good theme for starting the yearbook back up, and it’s also relevant because every year, every semester, we all go back to square one and get to start over.