Sara Wilson: How did you get involved with yearbook?

Mack McCollum: It’s really funny, actually, how I became editor of the yearbook. My sophomore year, the teacher who is in charge of it said ‘Hey, you’re kind of responsible. I want you to be in yearbook this year, so when we get to your senior year we will have an editor. Nobody is taking an interest in yearbook.’ So I said I would do it. It’s better than a lot of other electives. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had good grades, but I wasn’t in traditional fields of studies and didn’t really care. It ended up being fun and I enjoyed it. So when it got to senior year, they put me as editor. It was just a strange process, because the teacher who invited me to join wasn’t there when I was a senior. So that relationship wasn’t continued in the way I expected.

 

SW: You said there wasn’t a lot of interest. Was it a fairly small program?

MM: Yes, and it was a very small school. I went there because I have ADHD and dyslexia, and they have a good program there for students with it. My parents had just come off the mission field. We lived overseas for 14 years, and so they came back so I could go to school where I could get what I needed. When I got there, I had 23 people in my class. I graduated with 19.

 

SW: So how many people were on the yearbook staff typically?

MM: There were like nine or ten of us. But it was from sophomore up. It was really disorganized.

 

SW: How so?

MM: Uh...so I was in student government. The week before school started, the student government had to come and set up the school basically. The yearbook teacher requested for me to specifically work with her. And she was like “I requested you because I don’t know what is going to happen. We have people who are going to be in yearbook, but basically you and me in the next two hours while cleaning this room are going to decide who is going to do what.”

 

SW: So there was some sort of hierarchy, but it wasn’t extremely rigid?

MM: Yeah. They basically had the editor decide—because we knew the students and each other better. So my teacher just asked where people should be, and we just pushed those people into those places.

 

SW: And were they all accepting of their given roles?

MM: For the most part. There was one person—I think we gave her design editor and she wanted to be a writer.

 

SW: Within the yearbook program, was there any type of training or education about how to put the book together, interviewing skills, or any foundational skill sets?

MM: Yes and no at the same time. It was very open, to where we had to figure everything out because our former advisor had left. At the beginning of the year, there was a conference we went to with Walsworth. They taught us how yearbook works. We’d meet with a graphic designer and I would bring up my idea for the theme. I did something like “Adventure Awaits” or something cliche like that. The first month and a half of the class was tutorials on how Walsworth worked. We worked through their online, really crappy version of InDesign.

 

SW: What were some of the strengths of the program?

MM: The main thing I took away was the relationship I created with that teacher. We were a small school, so it was fine to have a more intimate relationship with your teacher. They knew you better. I’ve had teachers pray over me multiple times and I’d pray over them. My advisor, Ashley Sigler—we just called her Ashley because she was like 25 and this was her first teaching job. We ended up having two months left at the end of the year after we finished the book, and so we would just chill. It turned into “Ashley Sigler’s College Survival Class.” I would say the biggest thing we took away was preparation for college, more emotionally and relationally. What we took away professionally was being able to teach yourselves. A lot of Adobe products you’re not going to learn in a classroom, so you have to figure it out yourself. We were like the “Sandlot” yearbook group basically.

 

SW: Do you think that intimacy translated into the writers being able to tell better stories?

MM: Yes. Our class in particular was really close, because during my freshman year a girl died by suicide. She had been at the school since kindergarten. Everyone knew Hannah. Everyone loved Hannah. She was going to go on to do great things. With such a small class, and everyone being there since kindergarten except for like me and three other people, our school just crumbled. We shut down for a week, and our class stayed home a week longer because of how impactful it was in our group. So, we got to senior year, and I went back and forth between the head of the English and Arts department and my advisor about what we wanted to do for Hannah in the yearbook. There had to be something, but the English head was totally against it. She thought it was unprofessional.

 

SW: Why?

MM: She said it would make the yearbook about Hannah and not about the class. So I had to be the mediator between the two of them. Eventually it got to where I was talking to the family, her, and my advisor. The family wanted something in the book, obviously. Our advisors wanted something. Our class wanted something, so it was all of us against this woman in leadership. She eventually said we could have half a page. But we were like “This is important to us. Our identity of our class is built on this. This is why we are so close.” I didn’t know Hannah that well because I had only been at the school for a few months, so I think it was good for me to be an unbiased mediator. But that intimacy really made the goal of the yearbook more important.

 

SW: What were some of the challenges or areas of growth you experienced as an editor?

MM: Really just knowing what it meant and what it was to be an editor. Because I had no idea. I just saw it as a leadership opportunity. I had to learn from my teacher to make people excited to do things they didn’t want to do. It was a stepping stone to what I wanted to do, but in a weird way.

 

SW: Yeah, that is sort of my next set of questions: why or how did you feel your high school experience led you to your current college experience?

MM: I do creative media right now, but I mostly do concert photography and videography and music video production. And then I work in the summers at a camp where I am a video director. That all happened because my senior year of high school, our school was on a church campus and I was involved in the church. The music minister basically walked up to me and said “Hey, you’re in charge of yearbook. You ever want to switch live-stream? I think you’d be good at it.” I didn’t really see the correlation between yearbook and that, but he saw it. So that laid the groundwork to be the director for switching Sunday services on Monday mornings.

 

SW: And you liked it?

MM: Yes, it was awesome. It was totally what I wanted to do.

 

SW: Why do you think your involvement in high school was important to you? How did it shape your ideas of what journalism is or should be?

MM: There wasn’t much at our high school besides preparing you to go to college and be good at general studies. Which I guess high schools are supposed to do. But we didn’t explore anything else. People thought I was going to be a pastor. My parents are missionaries and I was the chaplain at my school, but I’d be a terrible pastor. I hadn’t experienced a place where I understood that I wanted to do media or production. There was nowhere for me to experience that, and I didn’t understand that that was where my creativity lied. Yearbook was my first taste of that by editing photos and editing spreads. I think that was impactful where I was like “This is what I kind of want to do.” But it was really back in my brain and I didn’t put it together until I got to college and took my first film class. There was a really weird connection, I guess, between the two.