It's FINALLY summertime!!
Well, it's been summertime for a few weeks, but now it feels like it's summertime because I graduated yesterday. Again, I guess.
After enrolling in the shortest graduate school in the country (forgot to read the fine print when I signed up that elaborated that while it truly is the shortest grad school in the country, it feels like the longest), I FINALLY made it to the end.
WHEW!
I never knew just how long six long weeks were until taking the New York University Summer Publishing Institute, and living through the more than 100 (no joke) PowerPoint presentations and dozens of hours of group work that went with it. And yet I would do it all over again. I learned a ton about the industry, shook the hands of numerous publishing executives who were kind enough to take the time to impart their wisdom, and met some really great people along the way who are in similar shoes. But with NYU SPI looking good on my resume, I'm ready to hit the ground running in the publishing industry.
Now to find a job.
And to help me, NYU kindly set up a job fair to at the culmination of the program with all the big names in both the book and magazine publishing industry. We're talking Hearst, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Scholastic, Hachette, etc.
After spending days preparing for the job fair between polishing up my final project for school, I was so frazzled the night before the job fair looking at my resume that I had read over for the gazillionth time that evening alone, that I actually could not comprehend what the sentences were actually saying. Brent said "enough already" after I thrust a well-worn copy of my resume in his lap and pointed at one of the last sentences. "BRENT! Is it 'in' or 'on' that I mean here? Did I write stories focusing on topics ranging from X to Y or did I write stories focusing in topics? On or in? ON OR IN!?!?!? And did you read this again? Are you sure there aren't any typos on this? Or is it 'Are you sure there aren't any typos in this?' ON OR IN!?!?!?!"
After missing a perfectly good night's rest, I high-tailed it to the job fair in plenty of time to ensure that I was one of the first ones there so I could have more time for anticipation and hyperventilation.
Like any job fair, I spent most of it waiting in line. Yet even that was productive because my classmates and I used that time to exchange notes along the lines of, "When you go to that table, make sure you talk to the girl, and not the guy," or "The lady at that table will grill you until you break," etc. And while I feel like I did really well with some interviewers (and even scored an interview for a position I hadn't even formally applied for at a huge book publishing company - score!), there were of course the "interviews" I felt I bombed, like the one at Random House where I blanked out for a good five seconds (which seemed to last an ETERNITY) when the interviewer asked me which imprint I would ideally like to work for. Luckily, the "bad" interviews were few and far between.
And now my thank you notes and e-mails are written with yet another reiteration about how my skills will undoubtedly translate well at your small magazine publishing company/ginormous book publishing company/ANYWHERE IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY and now all I have to do is wait for the phone to ring and obsessively check my e-mail.
Huh. And I thought school was hard.
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