If you'll be in New York this fall, you're passionate about really great children's and YA books, and you have eight to ten hours to spare during the business week, you're welcome to apply for an internship with Arthur A. Levine Books. Our interns help us track, read, and respond to manuscripts; perform basic clerical tasks like opening the mail and making copies; and complete special projects based on personal interests and need. The position is unpaid, but if you're a college student, we will do whatever's necessary to see that you get college credit -- and there are always lots of free books around the office! Preference goes to college students and people interested in pursuing an editorial career in children's publishing, but anyone is welcome to apply. For more information, see our FAQ page here.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
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Being stuck in Black Hole, Ohio, obviously this fall won't really work. But is this an annual program? Ohhh, why oh why didn't I schuck reality and just move to NYC for school before real life got in the way?
ReplyDeleteOh gosh...this would be my dream. If only I was five years older, out of high school, and out of college. :/
ReplyDeleteThe company is rich enough to pay those college students at least a minimum wage! One wonders if this position is made for rich students only.
ReplyDeleteIf you increase reward for services to include both college credit and an hourly wage, at minimum, you will be teaching those students a great deal about professionalism.
If they have skills enough to work for the company, they deserve to be given the respect of a wage.
Again, the company can CERTAINLY afford to do it.
The company is just getting free cheap labor, in my opinion. Make the interns earn some $$$ for their work, and teach them something positive about being businesslike and professional and self confidence and self respect.
"Oh gosh...this would be my dream. If only I was five years older, out of high school, and out of college."
ReplyDeleteLOL! If only I was ten years younger and in college again...
And just because this blog will always make me think of squid, and I seem to enjoy reading the NYT at 2 in the morning:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/books/review/Bruder-t.html?ex=1186027200&en=839a8574d0355f21&ei=5070
(there's also an interesting article on Austen in the books section)
uyI just noticed your books you're currently reading. How do you juggle work, blogging, reading 3 books at once (this bemuses me the most, won't you get all confused?), reading SQUIDs, and life, LOL?
ReplyDeleterindawriter, I'm not sure if this is true everywhere, but I know that many universities will not grant students college credit for paid work. I agree that unpaid internships are a terrible hardship on people, especially non-students, without family money to get them through, but college credit for students seems like a very good compromise.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could carve out 10 hours a week from my current full time job to explore a career transition! From lawyer to children's book editor--sounds like a dream transition to me.
any other jobs available over there? editorial asst, asst editor, anything...?
ReplyDeleteOh, I wish. I love my elementary school teaching job, but I would love to read books as a job. Well, at least I think I do, maybe if I did I wouldn't love it.
ReplyDeleteDear Rindawriter,
ReplyDeleteActually, Scholastic is doing poorly compared to other publishers. They were lucky to get the HP series (mostly because they were lucky to have Arthur at the time). Wall Street financial analysts, for the most part, don't believe that Scholastic will be able to keep up the growth. Book publishing, like the movie production business, is a hit or miss business.
With respect to college credit, I note that college credit is worth more than the seventy-some odd dollars a week the intern would earn.
Lastly, professionalism is an attitude. You do things well and you do things right because you're supposed to and because it's good and because you're proud of your work-product, not because you're being paid for it.
Well, dear Brooklyn Arden, If professionalism is JUST an attitude, then it is VERY odd indeed that professional members are defined in SCBWI as writers who have been published and PAID!
ReplyDeleteI would assume that profesional editors work and get paid. Therefore, you cannot call unpaid interns professional in any way since proper attitude is only PART of being professional.
I'm a professional copy editor because I get paid AND because I keep getting PAID BECAUSE I am BOTH courteous and doing excellent work.
And I didn't have to intern for free or for college credit to get a job.
Scholastic is a HUGE company. And I didn't need to attend a recent ALA conference to figure that one out--although it was more than obvious there.
It's a real lack of professionalism, to my mind, on the part of the company's staff to not pay their interns at least minimum wage--which is humiliating enough. And surely the school sending the interns has to be paid for the college credit? I mean the company is NOT being paid by the student for the college credit.
Seems to me the company is getting a great deal for free.
The company is plenty big enough to invest dollars in their interns. That is, if they want the best in future editors. They aren't some small review magazine, for example that genuinely needs the unpaid help.
If the company is not doing well financially after having J.K. Rowling on board...well, maybe, they really do need to be looking seriously at how they invest their dollars and start investing more money in training high-quality workers....
I'm sure there are plenty of needy professional editors out there who would be more than happy to just do menial jobs for menial in a big publishing company just to get a foot in the door.
The company could, you know, be offering intern scholarships.
Sorry, Brookly Arden: I would think that surely you yourself are professional enough to know that getting paid for a job well done is a whole different world from not getting paid.......and I don't mean that in a snide way but, intellectually speaking, for the sake of reasonable and unemotional arguement.
I mean "menial jobs for menial work." I can't get away from the day job even on blogs.....
ReplyDeleteRinda, first of all, you should note that I did not make the comment about professionalism -- my friend J. did -- so you should direct your response to him, not to me. Still, thanks to child_lit, I'm used to your rudeness and tendency to (as far as I can tell) post the very first thing that comes to your fingers, so it doesn't bother me much.
ReplyDeleteAnd I happen to agree with J.'s definition of professionalism. One becomes a professional by being paid for it, true, but one can act like a professional and have a professional attitude without payment. I wish we could pay our fall and spring interns, but the finances of publishing in general and the policies of Scholastic in particular do not permit it, other than through our official summertime intern program (which you should look into, Sarah and Stella). So we offer them what we can: experience; an editorial education; free books; college credit; job leads and recommendations when the time comes. Two of our former AALB interns now work at Scholastic, one at Candlewick, so the experience DOES pay off in creating future publishing professionals (by your definition). An unpaid system isn't perfect, but it's what we can do, and it's better for both us AND those aspiring editors than no internships at all.