After about 20 hours of dedication throughout the weeks, on May 8, my co-editor Medha Imam and I published the list of senior superlatives. Yet we had no satisfaction and no closure with the situation because the management of the survey results was removed from our control. After posting it on our website and Facebook, there was a series of comments criticizing the list. “Dumb,” “What a short bogus list,” and “No not cool f**k these superlatives!!” were some of the comments. Medha even received text messages at 3 a.m. following the announcement of Prom King and Prom Queen.
The process of senior superlatives is a long and arduous one. First, Medha and I had to come up with the categories and send a cumulative list to get approved by the administration. We received a version of the list with requests to make specific changes to the categories, rewording them or deleting them, which was fine with us. We made these changes. We did what the administration asked. During this time, we were taking nominations for each of these categories, where people either emailed the nominations in or told them to us in person either before or after school. After the nominating period, we had to either email or Facebook message each and every person nominated, asking for their approval. We sent more than 689 emails, not even counting the return emails and countless Facebook pages. If the student rejected their nomination, we took them off the list. From there, we had two rounds of voting set up via a Sharepoint survey.
What should have been a simple, though tedious process turned into a nightmare when we were informed, only about two days from Prom, that the administration was deleting some of the categories. From their point of view, it was a couple of categories. From our point of view, it was tons of emails and hours of hard work. But more than that, we foresaw tons of complaints from students.
We heard: “What happened to senior superlatives?” “Why wasn’t the list at prom?” “Why was my category deleted?” But, we do not have an answer for any of these questions. Instead, the administration has the answers to these questions, not us. Hours went into this project, and honestly it’s the hardest thing we’ve worked on all year. Our “short bogus list” will be seen as nothing more than that, and what we’ve learned is that we will always be under the heavy arm of authority.
