Our trip to New York was an overall amazing learning experience for me. Not only did I get to learn about a new city, but I also got to learn from professionals in the publishing industry. Outside of taking one course on Editing for Publication for a semester I didn’t have much first-hand experience in the publishing field. It was so valuable for me to discover how many different jobs there are within publishing outside of strictly editing as there are many aspects that go into getting a book published, such as marketing the book. Along with there being many different jobs within publishing, it was also nice to discover that there are also many avenues to getting into publishing. I was really worried about not having done any internships until we met with one publishing agent who had never had an internship prior to getting into publishing. I thought her advice on having whatever experience you have work for was both comforting and enlightening; comforting because as a previous STEM major, I don’t have much English-related experience; however, I do have medical and scientific experience that I thought would go to waste. However, after hearing how she parlayed her administrative experiences into getting hired in publishing I realized that I could do the same with my science experience. It gave me the idea to look for editing positions in medical writing.
One point that was brought up at multiple of our meetings with the publishing professionals was the importance of doing informational interviews. An informational interview is one in which you schedule a brief meeting with individuals working at different publishing houses for them to answer any questions you may have or for them to provide any advice that they have. Prior to the mention of informational interviews in these meetings I had never heard of this concept before. I appreciated that, recognizing that we, as new graduates and current students, would be worried about reaching out to publishing houses, we were reassured that publishing agents wouldn’t be bothered by receiving cold emails; a point that I would have worried about when the time came to reach out. The meetings that we went to during this trip were very invaluable experiences for me. I left all of the meetings with an even stronger sense of excitement for a career in publishing.