URI yearbook back after year-long hiatus
After a one-year-long hiatus, URI will once again have a yearbook. Photo from web.uri.edu.
Due to COVID-19, the official yearbook of the University of Rhode Island, the Renaissance Yearbook, was never released in 2020.
This year, Editor-in-Chief Hayley O’Marra has to put together two different yearbooks.
According to O’Marra, the books published in 2018 and 2019 were done by staff advisor Maureen McDermott. She is currently working on the 2020 and 2021 yearbooks as well.
The Renaissance has been released annually since 1972 when it replaced The Grist, which had been the University’s yearbook since 1897. The yearbook is usually around 250 pages and has highlights from the academic year featuring clubs, Greek Life and many other events that depicted student life on campus at that time. It will also include the senior class in alphabetical order, with their senior portraits
“The 2020 and 2021 [yearbook] will be smaller, since there were less opportunities to photograph events and programs,” McDermott said.
O’Marra said that she is working to include as much as possible in the book. Like many clubs this year, the yearbook has had difficulty recruiting. Both McDermott and O’Marra said that the yearbook never had a large recruitment event, making it difficult to get new members to join the club.
As a result, O’Marra has been laying out, editing and sending the yearbook out for publication by herself. Still, she has been hosting Zoom meetings on Mondays at 6 p.m. in hopes to attract new members.
In addition to the difficulty recruiting, O’Marra said that making the yearbook has been more difficult than usual.
“A lot of it is made possible by Jostens which is our publishing company and our representative, Tara,” O’Marra said. “She does so much for us too.”
She has started to use the club’s Instagram account for the first time in years as a way to promote the club and get more information about it out. She said although the club had not been using the account, as it had been inactive since 2017, they have continued publishing the books nonetheless.
O’Marra herself only joined the club last year. She said that most of the other members were pharmacy students, which meant that they were often too busy to be truly involved and chose to focus on their classes instead. The previous president, who had been working on the 2019 book, ultimately decided that she needed to focus specifically on her studies, leading to McDermott finishing the book.
According to McDermott, the 2019 book has just been shipped and the 2020 book is currently in the ending stages and is getting finished by O’Marra. She said that the 2021 book is also currently in production right now, but is further behind than the 2020 book and is still gathering content.
Typically, the students featured in the book are the senior class. Books cost $60 before graduation, but cost $100 after students graduate. Typically, they are ordered when shooting the senior portrait. The yearbooks are sent out in the fall semester, following graduation.
O’Marra and McDermott will continue to work on the yearbook in hopes of chronicling the college experience for the URI community, but are looking for new members to join the team.