Laura Kattilakoski
Staff Writer
High school has plenty of media classes to prepare students to take on their future careers. When looking back on her years Coppell High School, senior Tina Gutierrez has many fond memories of her time on the Round-Up yearbook staff.
This year, Gutierrez is the academics section editor for the yearbook. Next year, she plans to attend the University of Southern California to continue her education in the journalism field.
“I’m perusing journalism in college,” Gutierrez said. “I’m going to be a broadcast major and take communications too. [Yearbook has] definitely prepared me for it because it’s a job setting; we work towards a goal, we have responsibilities, it costs money, so it [has] definitely prepared me for the work setting.”
Gutierrez has always enjoyed writing and found her interest in journalism upon joining the middle school yearbook staff. When she arrived at high school, she took both journalism and photojournalism her freshman year and joined yearbook her sophomore year.
“[Journalism and photo journalism] just made me want to be part of [the yearbook staff] even more because it sparked my interest,” Gutierrez said. “I’ve always wanted to be in yearbook since I was on the middle school yearbook in eighth grade. I just really love writing and I wanted to get better at taking photos, so I thought this would be a good way to combine the two.”
While yearbook involves a lot of hard work and long hours, the end the product is something that lasts forever and there are plenty of beneficial experiences along the way.
“It gives [students] the employability skills like meeting deadlines and working with peers as a team toward an end goal. It helps them to see a bigger picture for projects than just what a grade is or things like that,” Round-Up adviser Rachel Pellegrino said.
As well as all of the hard work that goes into the yearbook, there are also many fun, laid back times for the staff.
“My favorite memories are probably our field trips. Last year on spring break, we went to New York and that was so much fun. We got to see the NBC studio, we saw where SNL is filmed and the Rockefeller Center,” Gutierrez said. “Just spending time with the yearbook people [is fun], they’re just such a good group of people and they share the same interest as [me]. Any time I got to spend time with them are my favorite memories.”
Gutierrez’s duties involve editing all of the pages in her section and making sure the final product is something worth buying.
“Tina is my editor,” senior staff writer Shannon Miller said. “She works really hard to catch all of our mistakes and make sure everything is worded in the best way possible and [that] our pages look the best they can for the yearbook. She has definitely helped me a lot and I really appreciate that.”
As Gutierrez leaves high school, her career in journalism is far from over.
“In 10 years, after any graduate school I might have to do, I see myself working for a news network: writing or producing, not necessarily the anchor part, but just in journalism for sure,” Gutierrez said.
