King's Seniors Enter Publishing Industry

Student Internships Translate to Jobs

NEW YORK, April 18, 2012—Students at The King’s College are surrounded by job and internship opportunities in almost any field imaginable. Two students, Derek Reed (MCA ’12) and Stephen Wesley (PPE ’12), landed impressive internships, and then jobs, in the publishing industry this semester by taking advantage of the College’s New York City location.

Derek Reed, a senior studying Media, Culture, and the Arts (MCA), is an intern at the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House. Reed described his internship saying “I work mostly in editorial, primarily under an editor who works on politics titles (he edited George W. Bush’s Decision Points).” Reed said that his work includes reading book proposals, commenting on in-process manuscripts, drafting letters to agents and authors, and researching new projects under consideration. He also said that “for marketing and publicity, I've done a lot of mailings and reached out to influential media outlets and blogs to try and get coverage for our books.”

Reed pursued the opportunity after Michele DeKonty, Director of Career Services, convinced the management at Crown Publishing to create an internship position specifically for King’s students.

The King’s education has integrated well with Reed’s internship. He said that “the structure of the King's education—diving into a wide range of topics, picking apart the strengths and weaknesses of what you're reading, and becoming familiar enough with those topics to write and speak about them with authority—is great, if you want to do editorial work, whether that's as a journalist or a book editor.”

Stephen Wesley, a classmate of Reed’s, is a senior studying Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and is an editorial assistant at Columbia University Press, working in acquisitions for the social sciences.

The acquisitions department guides each professor’s proposed project through all stages of writing, editing, peer reviewing, contracting, and board meetings to create a finished manuscript. Wesley said that at his job he “handles most of the clerical duties: securing peer reviews, paying out honoraria, coding manuscripts, drafting publishing contracts, gathering copyright permissions, and managing our internal schedules.”

Wesley first heard about the position while working at a literary agency in Brooklyn. Wesley said “My old boss worked briefly at Columbia and introduced me to the assistant editor for the Religion, Philosophy, and Animal Studies book list, who took me on as an intern.” Not long after, Columbia University Press offered Wesley a paid position as an editorial assistant.

Speaking of his experience at Columbia, Wesley said “I was certainly out-of-place among all the other interns, who were uniformly English or publishing majors.” But that didn’t stop him from excelling at his work. Wesley said that his work as a teacher’s assistant, along with the heavy emphasis on writing at King’s, helped him “come to know Chicago style, the Bedford handbook, and MW/OED spelling like the back of my very cramped hand.”

Both Reed and Wesley see themselves working in publishing for the time being. When asked how his internship fits into his career plan, Reed said, “Well, this is question just became more relevant. Yesterday, I was offered a job here as an Editorial Assistant--the exact job I was hoping to get, coming out of college. As an intern, I didn't work under the editor who was interviewing me for the job, so he went around and asked pretty much everyone I had worked for here about me. He told me what a few of those people said—all good things, thankfully!—and that was a cool moment.” Wesley plans on using his experience to gain a position acquiring fiction for a trade house like HarperCollins or RandomHouse.

The King’s College educates students in the ideas upon which nations rise and fall. With a focused curriculum in the liberal arts tradition, students are prepared to help shape, and eventually to lead, the institutions of government, civil society, media, law, business, education, the arts, and the church. King’s is a Christian college located in the Empire State Building in New York City.

For more information about The King's College please contact: Matthias Clock
Communications Coordinator
212.659.3602