After five years of waiting, a group of Aberdeen High School alumni recently got their wish — a trombone emoji will be added to device keyboards all around the world early next year.

Evan Demos, 23, of Pylesville, said it had been so long since he worked on the proposal, he actually forgot about it.

“It’s pretty cool to know that I’ll be a part of emoji history,” he said.

Demos was among a group of 12 students in the Science and Mathematics Academy at Aberdeen High School in November 2019 who submitted a formal proposal to Unicode as part of a class assignment for a technical writing course.

The Unicode Consortium is the “standard body for the internationalization of software and services,” according to its website. Unicode’s Emoji Subcommittee regularly reviews proposals for new emojis to add to keyboards and makes decisions based on expected popularity and relevancy.

The proposal was drafted over a two-week span by Brendan Althoff, Brandon Brown, Dillon Capalongo, Gabriel Cardell, William Davis, Demos, Nathaniel Dimick, Kristen Doresy, Ian Leach, David Oguh, Cristopher Pappas and Mark Rosser.

All of them graduated between 2020 and 2021, according to a news release from Harford County Public Schools.

“It’s been like five or six years since we wrote that proposal so it’s kind of insane that it’s actually been approved,” Rosser, 22, said.

Rosser said that the group had a goal of submitting a new emoji design and had discussions about what design to choose. Several of the students were in band and a certain trombone player noticed that his instrument was missing from the array of music-themed emojis already included on keyboards.

To increase their chances of success, Rosser said students researched whether trombones were trending upward or downward in popularity and in their proposal made the case for why the emoji would be often used. Other students were responsible for creating a 3D rendering of the emoji, using skills learned in previous modeling classes.

The new trombone emoji will boost representation among musical instruments, according to a news release from Harford County Public Schools while also providing humor, “such as the iconic ‘womp womp’ sound often associated with playful mistakes.”

Academy program specialist and educator Sarah Ashley informed the students of the decision a few weeks ago.

“This approval is the perfect end to a five-year journey filled with hard work and creativity. I couldn’t be prouder of these graduates for taking a concept and turning it into something that will now be used worldwide,” Ashley stated in the news release.

The emoji will “soon be available” worldwide wherever an emoji keyboard is supported.

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