Is Honors Yearbook even a class? by Jessica

Is Honors Yearbook even a class? by Jessica - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

Most adults often scoff at the idea of having an easy elective as a class in order to boost your GPA. They believe that electives are supposed to be created to enrich a student with a wealth of knowledge and that "easy" electives don't provide it. As a student who struggled during her sophomore year of high school after taking all Honors and Advanced Placement courses, I thought that I needed something to help my GPA. In doing so, I found the Honors Yearbook course and decided to pick that as my elective for junior year. Little did I know that Honors Yearbook would be the spark that I needed to begin building my leadership skills.
I’ve always thought that creating a yearbook would be the easiest thing because all we do is put pictures in the book. Well, I was wrong. There are many factors that go into making a yearbook and just putting pictures in the book is only a fraction of it. As a new editorial staff of the yearbook, I was just in charge of putting the pictures and story in the spread I was given. It was very simple. But being the fast worker that I was, I ended up asking for another spread and finishing that as well. This resulted in me being in charge of the title page, something no one else in class had done and that scared me since I wasn’t confident that I would be able to do it nicely. It’s the most important page because it was a way to introduce our high school values as a theme. My creative juices started flowing and I ended up dedicating over a week to create the graphics, table of contents, colors, and fonts. I invested so much time in creating my masterpiece and became so proud of all the work I had done to make it perfect.
Yearbook slowly became my passion and I applied to take Honors Yearbook II. This time I became a Chief Editor, but not just any Chief Editor, I was the Chief Editor of Design. During the first week, time management and knowing what to prioritize quickly became an issue as I was getting caught up in designing the many templates for the editorial staff to use for their spreads. It was tough juggling everything at once because the editorial staff relied on me to get the templates done on time in order for them to start their spread. I became worried that I wasn’t fit for this role but I still carried on and worked the weekend away. Creating text boxes and photo boxes while calculating distances between each box became a routine and I finished within the weekend. It takes so much patience to be able to sit for a long period of time and continue to work on your project even when you start doubting yourself, but I never gave up and continued on.
That is a skill you can’t learn just from reading books because experience is what makes you face the reality of how you deal with problems. Because I continued to dedicate myself to my project and never gave up, I ended up not only getting the work done, but more importantly I became proud of myself and more confident in my ability to do things. This helped me with my other classes because I started believing that I was able to learn the material if I set my mind to it and became patient with myself. My grades slowly started rising and I became less scared of asking people for help. While people still scoff at the idea of taking yearbook as an elective course, what they don’t know about is the skills and experiences you can acquire that sitting in a classroom won’t give.