Sophie Karaba Every summer, five yearbook staff members and Ms. Ross fly to a three-day “yearbook camp”. This year, Colleen O’Leary, Olivia Reese, Crystal Luo, Layla Passman and myself flew to Long Beach on Monday, July 27th. The trip started off with one student, who prefers to remain anonymous, checking in at the airport late and being told that her luggage may not make it on the flight with us, causing a great deal of stress to Ms. Ross especially. Luckily, when we landed in Los Angeles her luggage was there with the rest of ours. On the drive to Long Beach we made a stop at In ‘N Out Burger for lunch. With our stomachs full with red meat and fries, we arrived at California State University-Long Beach and were disappointed to find out that there was not, in fact, a beach nearby. We walked around the mostly empty campus, trying to find the dorms that we were staying in. Finally, we found “Los Alamitos”, the building where we were staying. The director of the camp, Mimi, greeted us enthusiastically with tote bags and “Yearbooks @ The Beach” t-shirts. The classroom sessions didn’t start until the next day, so we unpacked and then got straight to yearbook! We spent Monday night flipping through magazines for design inspirations and trying to come up with a theme for the 2015-2016 Latin yearbook. We ordered Domino’s and anxiously watched the online “pizza tracker” as we waited for our food to arrive. After a long time and a little progress, we took freezing cold showers and went to bed. On Tuesday morning, about fifteen other schools’ yearbook staff, most of them from California, joined us and we started classes. The next three days were full of informational sessions designed to help the yearbook staffs develop a theme and concept for the upcoming year’s book. We went to different sessions each day: among them, one focused on how to make good design layouts and one taught us how to conduct productive interviews. We spent the evenings creating index lists, schedules, the table of contents, and picking and developing the theme for this year’s yearbook until 10:30 or 11 every night. Ms. Ross was always there to help us out when we needed it and to share her ideas as she thought of them. After hours of working and brainstorming, Colleen and Olivia decided on a theme that they liked, and we all began working towards making the idea a reality. On Thursday morning, we packed up to fly back home. Our staff won a Polaroid camera–much to our excitement–from collecting the most points in daily creative challenges. By the time we left Long Beach, we had a great theme and concept in place for the yearbook, a new Polaroid camera, and even a little bit of a tan! Yearbook camp made me really excited about this year’s yearbook, and we all would love to see new people join us on Thursdays to make this book the best one yet!]]>