Yearbook

Our college yearbooks were released at the end of last week but I've only picked up my copy yesterday. Well, putting it succinctly, it was disappointing.

I don't know where to start ranting about our yearbook. It's the last one for most of us so we all hoped it would be something worthwhile. (I hope our medschool yearbook would be well made, but I'm getting waaay ahead of myself :P)

Back to the yearbook, it's just too plain. The cover was plain (although I think that's our school's style, I'm not sure though) and it was all in black and white (except for the teachers' pictures.) I don't really remember how much we've paid for the yearbook but I'm positive that we didn't get our money's worth. It's not just about the blandness. It's about the numerous errors - blank pictures, misspellings, typographical errors, formatting errors, and just simple f***-ups.

Four of our batchmates from BSN had no pictures (and there are lots more from the other courses too). I feel so bad for them because one of these four girls is a cum laude, the two are class secretaries who most probably helped in compiling yearbook stuff from their sections, and the other, well, it's just not right to not have a picture when you had yours taken. How I hate the ineptitude of our school.

The misspellings and typographical errors can be forgivable if kept to a minimum (and by minimum, I mean 5 at most). It seems that our yearbook was not edited. Maybe no one proofread the final copy, I don't know why since there's an editor-in-chief supposedly. Oh, lest I forget, there are so many grammatical errors! It hurts my eyes and my mind comprehending what really is meant by the sentences. I know that I'm not perfect in grammar. Heck, I'm not even good at it but S-V agreement, that' so elementary.

Formatting errors may be a minor problem for some but this just irks me so much. If it's supposed to be bold, it should be bold. If it's italicized and has a bigger font size, it should be that way for everyone. That way, it would be clean. Now to the F-ups... Misspelling a name in a yearbook: I think that's a big no-no, don't you? A picture with a wrong name in a caption: just embarrassing. Copy-pasted write ups, achievements being placed under one person instead of the right student, additional false information, these are some of those that I've observed.

Another thing is that there was no differentiation of the academic award. Why the heck did they ask us to write our achievements if they weren't going to put it there. I just wish that if they didn't want to place the academic awards (such as Dean's lister) from first year to fourth year they would've said so in the first place. I'm sorry if this may seem off, but why did they not write if you graduated cum laude or had an honorable mention. It's not that hard. The school has a list. At first I thought that in the entirety of the yearbook there would be no listing of the graduation awards, fortunately there's a list on one of the back pages BUT it's not complete, there are wrong spellings, etc. Why weren't the awards of the nursing (and other courses) graduates not included. I have friends who have been a student leaders since sophomore year and also had other awards for performing but it wasn't listed (but a few were listed). Ugh. I really dislike incompetence. You could've just asked for help. Hopefully in the next years, there will be representatives from each course to oversee the yearbook.

There's probably nothing we could do to change this. Thinking optimistically though, even if these things are out of (or in) the yearbook, what matters is what we have in our memories and how we will remember each other and college.