New York City, #2

Duke in New York and Random House. There’s so much to explain and talk about! I’m really looking forward to doing some kind of coffee/seminar about the book publishing world when I get back to Duke, because I’ve learned so much this summer and I’d like to share the knowledge. Hopefully you guys will find it fun to learn about, too.

Well, I’ll start by telling you about Duke in New York. It’s a “study away” program, meaning that it works just like study abroad except we’re here in the U.S.. Professor Torgovnick, our program director, and Katie, our RA, helped us get used to the city and find our way around for a week before class actually started. After a week in NYC, our class (English 181BS, “The Arts in New York”) began. We met for 4 hours every Monday (sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t) and 2 hours on Saturday to learn about NYC neighborhoods, cultural events, and literary/theatrical representations of New York. On weekday nights we went to plays and other performances. The class ended at the end of June. It was GREAT! You’ll hear more about it if I get to do a seminar/coffee.

In June I started my FANTASTIC internship at Random House. And although the internship was amazing, the first week in June was really tough because I had to learn to juggle a Duke class plus a full-time internship. The problem was that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. At school, I’m big on naps. If I have to get up early, I nap later. I’m usually a night owl. But if you’re working full-time, you can’t take naps during the day, so you have to learn to go to bed early. Let me tell you, I learned after the first week! It was brutal. It’s cool now though. I’m going to bed at like 9 or 10 these days.

But anyway, back to the internship – so great. I’m working mostly in editorial, so I go through submitted manuscripts, write editorial suggestions and evaluations, discuss manuscripts with my supervisors, and write rejection letters when necessary. I’ve been working on publicity projects for the blog and logging in photographs for a forthcoming book. I got the chance to handle the personal family photographs of a VERY famous person…and meet another VERY famous person…I’ll tell you more later!

The internship is really intense. We have hour-long luncheon seminars every Wednesday where we hear from representatives in different sectors of the company about careers in their departments. In addition to the daily responsibilities of our internship, we have an Intern Project that all 60 interns have to work on and complete.

But guess what? Every minute has been so much fun!

Ikee G.