Reading the Yellow Jacket is like a look into a formerly-successful company under new management. More specifically, it's like the management of an unsuccessful son who has taken over the family business in the great hopes of making his life a success but instead turns the business into a failure. In essence, the workers are good, the business has proven that it can succeed and a working system is in place.
Our story begins as new management institutes an effort to shake everything up and stimulate a new growth with a new vision. At first the old success holds on until, after much struggle, the spectre of change manages to shake free all remaining vestiges of the "old way" and replace them with reformed processes that are doomed to drive the company into the ground.
A look at the newest copy of the Yellow Jacket provides a wonderful place for the blame to rest: squarely on the shoulders of the editors. By far, the most glaring problems lie in "LeTourneau University Engineers Take 2nd Place at the International ASME Competition," as written by Chief Editor Maria Johnson and Assistant Editor Jil-Marie Williams. Even forgetting for a moment that this is the only article on the front page and that it is topped by a pixellated photo that should have been cropped, I will direct you to the text. The following excerpt is the opening paragraph, which I found indicative of the work as an entirety:
Competition is a very vigorous and time-consuming effort put out by all types of people in all different areas of life. Athletes compete in their specific sports for the glory and title and strive to be the best athlete. People in jobs compete with themselves as well as their co-workers to make the best career decisions and attempt to be the very best at whatever task they take upon themselves. So how does competition work when it comes to engineering, or more specifically, Mechanical Engineering?
And here is an excerpt which neither myself, my friends, nor my professors could make sense of.
However, only two out of the three members: Frank Dancer, a Senior who is majoring in Electrical Engineering, and Mike Montesinos, a Mechanical Engineering student who is also a Senior went to Washington D.C. on November 14-17 2003. Tagging along to this exciting competition was Dr. Roger Gonzalez, Ryan Decker, another Senior who is also majoring in Mechanical Engineering, would be competing in the BioMed Engineering Oral Speech competition.
In short, the publication still maintains enough high-caliber writers that hope can remain. The problem appears to be the cancerous management of Johnson and Williams that has taken the paper from a successful campus periodical to an intermittently-published hack job with quality reminiscent of kindergarten finger painting. Put simply: "Fix the management, fix the problem."
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at February 7, 2004 05:43 AM | TrackBack