Julia McDow: Signing off on my time at L’Acadien and The Verm

The last three years working at the L’Acadien yearbook and The Vermilion newspaper has been a learning experience, a place to make lifelong friends, and foster the drive to always discover. 

I worked for my high school’s yearbook and when the opportunity to work on another yearbook and be paid for my creative skills came, I grabbed it. Not knowing I would get so much more. 

Due to COVID, I did my interview for the job over Zoom with Mr. Tarver, and I remember being so nervous, but I didn’t need to be. Never have I met a more enthusiastic and welcoming person than Mr. Tarver. I have always admired how he is able to guide the student members while also letting them make their own decisions, truly allowing students to get a taste of real work experience as a team of peers. 

Always being design-oriented, it fit that working on the design team doing layout and graphics was, and still is, my main job. Andre Broussard was my first yearbook editor-in-chief, making the job look easy with how amazing he did. He was always cool under pressure and somehow had enough time for school and photographing just about every single event that happened beautifully.  

Then, I dragged my roommate Meg Norwood into a job at the yearbook. We also started doing graphics for The Vermilion newspaper where we met Adhamm Safford, a writer, the same year. Meg brought on Sarah Guidry and then a year later we got Ava Blanchard to join us. All five of us became a well functioning team of designing, writing and creating. 

All five of us became true friends with one another and I could never have thought myself lucky enough to be a part of such an amazing and inspiring group of people. I don’t think I will ever find another team of people that works with such magic. 

My junior year I was a layout designer for both The Vermilion and L’Acadien, which was very intense, but like everything with the job it taught me how to work on two major projects at the same time, communicate and function with two different teams and manage a group of people. 

It’s always a challenge to manage a group of people, let alone those that are your peers and the same age as you and in similar places in life. 

I want to say thank you to everyone’s patience in my learning and discovering of how to best manage. It was a learning curve and was a great leadership experience and helped teach new members what I had learned to ease them into the job. 

I learned how to train students to use Adobe InDesign, which is what we use to make the yearbook and newspaper, and constantly pushed for a better and more understandable layout. 

During my time, both the Vermilion and L’Acadien have won so many awards and I can’t thank the staff enough for all their hard work and whether we won awards or not, the work we made was great and continues to be even greater. 

My senior year I became editor-in-chief of the L’Acadien yearbook, which is when I questioned how Andre had made the job not seem so intense. Creating a yearbook requires the attention of a newspaper but with a longer deadline and end goal. 

I could have never done the job without my amazing editors, Ava Blachard for design, Morgan Courville as my managing editor, Meg Norwood for illustrations, and Andre Broussard and Morgan Parker for photography. 

I would also like to thank Adhamm Safford for always being able to write so eloquently whenever a story was needed and teaching me to always be curious and question things. Thank you for always being there through everything and being part of my art projects as well whenever I needed a model for photography or painting. 

Thank you to Andre Broussard for being a model editor-in-chief and always being there to talk and take extraordinary pictures. 

Thank you to Meg Norwood, Sarah Guidry and Ava Blanchard for being the best design team there could ever be. You are my art crew and we have been through so much together, thank you for being there for every up and down and pushing me to be better. You have made me a better designer, artist, and person and I can never say thank you enough for being there through every smile and tear. 

Especially thank you to Mr. Tarver for always being there to help answer my questions and make me into a better leader, student, and person. You have been the best advisor that an organization could have and I’ll miss being able to walk into the office anytime for our chats. 

Thank you to Kay Padilla, Morgan Parker, Morgan Courville, Isaac Henry, Alyus Dick, Boyd Daniels, and everyone at The Vermilion and L’Acadien yearbook for being amazing writers, photographers, designers and everything in between.

Thank you to everyone for helping me try out my ideas and inspiring me to be a better designer and leader. I will always keep the Student Publications close to my heart and forever be thankful for the experience and being able to work with the amazing people there. 

I know that you all will continue to do great work and I’ll be cheering from the sidelines now as I watch you grow into the amazing leaders I know you can be. 

I know I can be repetitive and that this probably sounds sappy, but there is not enough words or space in the layout to describe how proud and thankful I am of each person and the work that we have created together. 

Lastly, I just want to say how proud I am of my friends and staff for all the work they have done and continue to do so. 

And since I said this at every meeting to push the importance of InDesign training so much so that it became a running joke, I would like to say one last time, you can get a job with InDesign.