According to John Nguyen ’15, the editor-in-chief of the Stanford Quad Yearbook, an independent student-run group which normally releases a four-class yearbook every year, the Quad will not produce a yearbook this year.
“I was the editor-in-chief last year [as well], and staff retention was not great, and I wasn’t really able to recruit anyone new,” he said. “So by the end of the year, it was just me, [and] I made the yearbook last year by myself.”
Because he was forced to scramble this year to put out the yearbook, Nguyen said that he didn’t have time to recruit new members or figure out a plan for this year.
“At the end of winter quarter, we had a meeting with SAL [Student Activities and Leadership] and some other groups interested in keeping the Quad alive about what things we could do this year,” he said. “Our advisor said that it wasn’t sustainable to only have one person working on the yearbook, so I could tell that something big was happening.”
At this meeting, one of the four senior class presidents, Eric Iwashita ’15, was also in attendance, and he began working with other people at the meeting to figure out how to move forward.
“It was left pretty open-ended, but [at the end of the meeting], it was just assumed that we weren’t doing a Quad [due to a lack of students working on it], so I took it on as a personal project to find different options,” Iwashita said.
According to Iwashita, the senior class presidents and cabinet have decided to create a senior yearbook for the senior class, with the help of other members of the class of 2015.
“As senior class presidents, we are tasked with creating community with the class of 2015, which includes putting on events and doing anything we can to create community,” he said. “When I heard about this [the cancellation], I was pretty shocked … I would want to buy a yearbook or something to commemorate this year.”
Because he felt that other students in the senior class would feel the same as him and would want a yearbook from this year, he decided to take on the individual project of putting together a team to produce a senior memory book or web page, depending on what the seniors who volunteered to help would be capable of making.
He stressed the fact that the Quad is completely separate from the senior class presidents and the senior class cabinet and that they have had no control over the production of the yearbook.
“The yearbook was never our responsibility,” he added. “In our role [as senior class presidents], we are trying to do what we can to put something together for the class, since we just found out [about the cancellation].”
Normally, the Quad Yearbook would be a yearbook for all four class years; however, because the senior class is the only one taking on this project, Iwashita said that whatever the team created would be just about seniors and this year. He sent out an interest form to the class to gather help for the project.
“A couple people are extremely passionate about helping out [and] have the skills and level of interest needed, so judging from [the interest form], it looks like we’ll have a good team to put together,” Iwashita said.
He explained that an info session will be held on Tuesday at 12 p.m. in Old Union 215 for seniors interested in helping out with the senior yearbook. He also added that if other students are interested in helping out with the Quad next year to make sure that it gets published, then they should reach out to SAL.
Contact Josee Smith at jsmith11 ‘at’ stanford.edu.