By Ava Umpierre ’27
Derby High School’s Yearbook class took its first-ever field trip on Sept. 17, 2025. They visited Southern Connecticut State University, where they refined their journalism and photography skills to create an engaging yearbook. The students and teachers were satisfied with the field trip, and all of them left having learned something new.
Southern Connecticut State University showcased many workshops for the field trip. The field trip included photography, article writing, advertising, and sales — all the skills needed to make a great yearbook. During the field trip, the students had the opportunity to meet a graphic designer who helped design their school’s yearbook cover.
The attending DHS students were surprised by the short-notice field trip. Carter Ruggiero ‘26 said, “It was a nice surprise because it looks good on resumes.” Ruggiero shared that his favorite part of the trip was learning about photography at Southern. “I never knew how to take photos very well,” Ruggiero said. “It helps you find what angles are good to use and what you should look for in photos.” Ruggiero concludes that journalism and photography are team-building exercises requiring teamwork to work efficiently. “Yeah, it made it more clear that it’s a team-building exercise,” Ruggiero said about the class, “because last year it was a lot more independent than it is this year.”
Following Ruggiero’s words, Gavin Lagliva ’26 expressed his feelings of importance and excitement about participating in the class’s first field trip. “When they said that I was able to go on the field trip, I thought that it was amazing…I felt important, especially since there aren’t many kids in the class,” he said. Lagliva was also interested in, “just walking around campus, and seeing Southern University’s building and college life.”
English and Desktop Publishing/Yearbook teacher Rebecca Socha accompanied and supervised students on the field trip. Socha explained how her class was never able to have a field trip until now, since they switched yearbook publishers, and the new publisher hosts a workshop at Southern Connecticut State University. “Since we switched publishers, we were able to do a bunch of little workshops and come up with both the yearbook theme and cover,” says Socha. Socha also shared her hopes for a new design and style for the upcoming yearbooks: “My hope is that it looks different. I think every year that you put out a yearbook, typically, it gets improved every year.”
Socha shares that her proudest moment of the trip was seeing the excitement of her students. “Honestly, I think just seeing their excitement after we would meet back up after their workshops to debrief, and seeing all their excitement over all the different things that they learned or the stuff that they took away from their workshops would be my proudest moment of the trip.” Socha mentioned the possibility of future field trips for the class: “I’m hoping that this is going to be an annual thing, considering our new publisher; I bet we can look forward to more yearbook activities”.
The Raider Press 