Vista had pictures and names of almost all of the faculty and students, the extracurricular activities, clubs, sporting events, and other traditional features of a yearbook. The new Vista won’t exactly follow this format, but that is not to say that such subjects will be ignored. It would constitute a failure on our part not to include as much of Greenville College as possible.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, freshmen and super-seniors, alumni and faculty, to the brand new Greenville College Vista! As you are sure to have figured out by now, this is not the Vista of the past. It is a bittersweet moment for you, dear reader, and also for us. Year after year, the yearbook’s popularity withered; so many Vistas were being printed and never picked up that it was perhaps just as upsetting to keep things going the way they were as it is to change formats. It could just be a sign of the times that a yearbook was no longer a successful venture, but the fact of the matter is that something had to be done. And so, much like with the school’s newspaper, the Papyrus, which has moved to an online only format, some major changes have been made to evolve the Vista into something worth looking forward to, something exciting and fresh. For those that loved picking up the old Vista every year, it might be a difficult transition. It will be for us too. But, chances are high that this new take on a Greenville College tradition will win all of us over. So, what’s new?
6 | The Vista
First off, of course, the Vista is no longer a “yearbook.” Instead, it is a once-a-semester magazine -- 48 pages of articles, pictures, and designs put together by an ambitious and talented crew of Greenville College students with the help of professors dedicated to making the Vista a relevant part of the Greenville College experience. The new Vista features (and will continue to feature) profiles on alumni and students, analyses of campus culture, and reflections on
college life, all presented in a format with great graphic design and photographic integration. In addition, this magazine also contains articles about a wide range of topics that are important to students at Greenville College and, hopefully, the wider community of faculty, alumni, friends, and neighbors. The old
Next, assembling the Vista is now a much different beast than it was in years past. The body of contributors is made up of many people from different majors and backgrounds -- from photographers to commissioned and volunteer writers to designers to digital media wizards. The staff wants the Vista to be an unprecedented magazine in Greenville’s history. The goal is to strike that difficult balance of informative but fun. We can’t do that in a book filled with page after page of ID photos. The Vista is a long- running tradition of the school, and it is the intention of everyone working for this publication to keep it running for many, many more years. The fact that this magazine will be out on a semester-to-semester basis should be exciting, as it allows for more articles, pictures, and various other features than was previously possible in the yearbook. If you are a freshman just starting out at Greenville College, you will hopefully be able to collect eight of these magazines by the time you leave the school, recording the highs, the lows, the people you met and the events that shaped your years at GC. If you’re an upper classman, this magazine is, most of all, a new part of the Greenville experience, something unlike what has been available before the issue you