I started my day the same way I aimed to start all my days in New York, with breakfast at a nearby bakery. The morning walk to the bakery is always so refreshing and quickly became my favorite part of the morning, that is, when I was able to get myself out of bed early enough. On my way back from breakfast I ran into one of my suitemates and we decided to ride the train over to the Lower Manhattan area, where our meeting for the day would be, together to meet-up with the rest of the class. After not being able to find our classmates for a while, we finally met up with them and we all made our way over to the Oculus, which had the most interesting architectural designs I’ve seen for a shopping center/transit hub. We then walked over to the 9/11 memorial, which were two stunning waterfalls with the names of those lost etched into the ledge. Being at the memorial felt very emotional to me, seeing the many names of those lost during the tragedy laid out in one place; It was especially hard to see the names of mothers and their unborn child written on the memorial.
I had the opportunity to start my day with a visit to one of the “Big Five” Publishing houses, MacMillan, or more specifically with St. Martin’s Press, a publishing company under MacMillan. While the parent company MacMillan is known for publishing a wide range of publications, from novels to college textbook, St. Martin’s Press focuses more on best sellers and more commercial books. As my classmates and I made our way to the meeting, I could feel how excited everyone was to be meeting with them, especially after how insightful our meeting with Harper’s magazine the previous day was. This excitement only continued to grow as we entered The Equity Building and made our way to the St. Martin’s office to find bookshelves of books published by the press; Nothing excites a bunch of English majors than seeing bookshelves full of books. After walking through the halls in amazement and wonder at all the books, we finally made it the conference room where we were met by various members of the St. Martin’s publishing team….and pizza! Along with the pizza, on the table was a collection of titles published by the different imprints in St. Martin’s Press, such as mystery and young adult. I loved seeing all the different range of books that they worked on and was delighted that a lot of them were books that I would be interested in reading and hopefully editing in the future. I enjoyed hearing from the various members of the publishing team and about their different roles in the publishing process. Hearing all of the different roles made me realize just how diverse the field of publishing is. I particularly enjoyed that there was someone from the young adult imprint, Wednesday Books, as that’s the genre that I hope to one day edit. That being said, everyone was so helpful and insightful; I could tell that they were eager to share their knowledge with us and help us to better understand the field that we are pursuing as a career. 