All the Things that Led Me Here: How I Landed in the Scholarly Publishing Industry

Take Home Points:

• A diverse background can often be an extraordinary benefit in staying relevant and desirable to employers
• While you should network early and often, college and university will never be your last opportunity to do so
• Don’t be afraid to pivot—your true community may be behind that door you’re afraid to open

When I was a child, I wanted to be an actress, an astronaut, a pop star, and a princess. As I grew older, more realistic, and a little less fun, I considered being a physical therapist, a mechanic, or even a cosmetologist. I never thought I’d end up in scholarly publishing. If I’m being honest, I didn’t even know what scholarly publishing was until I got my current job.

Many of those I have met throughout my brief two-and-a-half years in the field have been welcoming. Their warmth and kindness are a huge reason I’ve considered growing within this field. It was because of all the support I received that I swallowed my immense shyness and attended my first ISMTE conference—alone—this past summer. The energy was palpable. Everyone was so kind and welcoming. I’m grateful that I’ve received this kind of support related to my life-long passion for writing and editing.

I used to write stories as a child. Like many of us, at least from what I hear from peers, I wrote well enough that someone (or several someones) went out of their way to tell me as much. I was fortunate enough to have people in my life who recognized my natural strengths and wanted to see me thrive in them. From workshops to extra writing assignments “just for fun,” my love of language and the crafting of it was nurtured from an early age.

One of my first memories is writing a long story on the living room floor while my family ignored my scribblings, engrossed in a movie on the television. The story was long-winded and nonsensical, I’m sure, but nevertheless, my mother read it and told me it was good. She said she loved it and that I might just become a writer one day. As small as the comment may have been to her, it filled me with pride, and I took it to heart.

When I was in high school, she found and enrolled me in a free, weeklong sleepaway journalism workshop aimed to introduce interested Black youth in the art and industry of journalism. It was and is still called The Frank Bolden Multimedia Workshop. The workshop was intensive. They had professionals from different subsets across the industry speak to us in hour-long lectures, they provided tours of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette office and KDKA TV news, and they offered social etiquette lessons to instill their desired brand of professionalism. From photographers to sports editors to on-air television anchors and reporters, everyone took an hour away from their busy schedules to romanticize the field. Their tone of voice, hand gestures, eye contact: It didn’t matter that they were talking to a room of otherwise bored and exhausted teenagers with short attention spans—they made working long hours sound like an undercover mission. Perpetual sleep deprivation sounded sexy according to their retellings.

I loved it. For three consecutive years, I decided to contribute to the print section of our final group project. I spent a lot of time with interviewees and alone at my computer, researching and truth seeking.

That experience was formative. Though I decided that journalism was likely far more stress than my already anxious disposition could handle, I still decided to stick with writing as a career path. My BFA is in creative writing, and I vowed throughout all four years of undergrad that I’d graduate and become a screenwriter. I spent all four years in the university’s production studio as a work study, where one of my coworkers introduced me to a non-profit she was familiar with. They helped refugee and exiled artists, mainly writers, gain their professional footing in the United States. It was my one and only internship as an undergrad, and it only lasted a semester. I had an inconsistent schedule and a last-minute role shift to an administrative internship because their managing editor was on extended leave at the time. So suffice to say, I didn’t learn anything about the editorial office. Despite that, I still managed to develop a rapport with some of the authors.

I often spoke with the authors and artists about their lives before and after their readings or gallery openings. I listened to their life-altering struggles and related to their passions and petty fears. My supervisors constantly told me not to distract the talent, but when I went off to test slides and music cues, we often decided to keep the conversation going. It was at this internship, having conversations I wasn’t technically supposed to have, where I became attached to the idea of working at a society for the sake of the mission. I never pitied them, these authors. In fact, they made it pretty difficult. They were kind, funny, passionate people who just needed a reprieve from the devastation they had experienced. Working that internship did not get me closer to an editorial office, but it did add two crucial words to my resume that ultimately helped me in the long run: Mission Driven.

I never applied to another internship during my undergrad years. It’s not that other prospects didn’t come up or catch my eye, I simply didn’t have time. I had two or three paying jobs at a time on top of 18 credits per semester to help pay for school and graduate on time, which I did manage to do. Predictably, my lack of networking and experience landed me a low-paying 9-5 job doing quality analysis for a closed captioning company. They recruited me late that summer after their system flagged my resume in a pool of many other recent graduates looking for a job. To be completely honest, I think their system probably flagged everyone that had finished college earlier that year but who still hadn’t found a job. When I got there, my entire team consisted of recent graduates just looking for some cash, aside from one guy who had been out on disability from his old gig. The job description was sketchy, and the purpose of the painfully tedious work was unclear. My team even banded together on several occasions to demand answers, to which we got none. After a round of layoffs due to a lack of profit (in yet another year of record profits), half of my team disappeared. So those of us left just kept on working, a little quieter this time.

Proofreading mysteriously sourced captions for three years, alone in my apartment, through an unprecedented modern global pandemic, taught me nothing. It was a means to an end, really. I had to pay rent, and I needed health insurance after I’d aged out of my mom’s plan.  Then my entire team was laid off for good. We found out why they had been sending us the same repetitive captions, why we had to read the same mess of nonsense words over and over again. All of those “new hires” based in Canada, using cutting-edge technology to improve captions, was just a new system a small team of developers had been working on for three years. They were using us to train AI the entire time. But of course, I didn’t know any of that yet. I was just catatonic at my desk, reading garbled captions. I was bored. Which is why I decided to do actual proofreading, editing, and English grammar tutoring on the side.

I began freelancing when the owner of a small local company unwittingly approached my register at one of my jobs. I found out about her company when she used her work email to sign up for our rewards program. And after I pitched my skills to this poor woman, who was wrangling her toddler and just trying to get home, she kindly allowed me to email her some of my pieces. I could tell my persistence at the time may have been her least favorite part of that day. And I certainly would not recommend breaking down a mother with a fussy young child. But it worked. She read my pieces and decided that I was mildly charming. So a year later, about seven months into a pandemic, I sat alone in my apartment editing a grad student’s final case study. It was my first time editing a case study. It was also one of several assignments at the time, so the act was mostly unremarkable, aside from my own brief acknowledgement that I rather enjoyed it. My interaction with the author was hasty and impersonal during the couple of days I worked with him. But a few weeks later, he warmed my heart when he took the time to thank me and tell me that he passed. He said I helped him a lot.

Whether I subconsciously tried to chase that feeling or I just needed to leave my hometown for a bit, I ended up applying for and getting my current job as an editorial assistant for two medical journals. I moved across the country to be a full-time employee of the society at which I currently work, to be a part of a team of wonderful, dedicated contractors. Like I said, I never sought out scholarly publishing. I can say in complete honesty that I probably would have sought out another job if it weren’t for the editorial team at both journals.

My first managing editor simply wanted to give an early career professional a foot in the door. She taught me the basics: how to process submissions and decisions, how to liaise between authors and associate editors, and how to fight with Editorial Manager and come out emotionally intact. The acts of merging multiple author accounts and adding conflict of interest forms post-acceptance have become second nature to me. And when all of my tricks fail, the publisher’s Journal Manager is always so helpful.

The contractors from Origin who work on my journals have helped build my confidence in some pretty uncertain times. One encouraged me to continue my education and explore different careers, while my current managing editors simply validated my knowledge and struggles—both actions made a world of difference for my day-to-day.

My next, and one of my current managing editors, helped me establish and polish the kind of work ethic I want and can sustain in this industry. I still have work to do on that front, but she has helped me to grow and apply myself in ways I never thought about previously. For two years, we have celebrated one another and covered each other’s’ sick days and vacations. We’ve laughed, learned, complained, and grown together. She has taught me a great deal about being the team with our boots on the ground, lending facetime at in-person conferences and chatting with society members. I cannot thank her, and my other team members, enough for the support they have offered me.

To the question, “Why did you go into scholarly publishing?” that was posed to me when I was invited to write this post, I still don’t have a good answer. It wasn’t my singular passion. I fell into it completely by accident. However, thinking through my past, it really seems like the one culmination of all of my passions and experiences up until this point. I didn’t actively pursue this path, yet I got this position because of my diverse professional background. I learned everything I know about the editorial office and publishing industry on the job. From submission intake, to helping authors add documents to their manuscript files, to processing page proofs and tracking them in a spreadsheet, I learned all of it over the past three years. I think a lot of early career folk, including myself, tend to think of the only relevant transferable skills as the ones that help you do the tasks of the job better. And while that certainly helps, I didn’t know how to do any of the day-to-day tasks upon my hiring. But I did have plenty of other skills that appealed to the hiring manager and the managing editors.

• I’d learned how to foster my curiosity and act on it—never be afraid to ask questions whether on the job or in a job interview. If I could cold-call an actual teen crisis counseling expert for The Urban Agenda (The Frank Bolden Multimedia Workshop’s print publication) when I was 16, my logic says I can easily remind the editor-in-chief about a late task that needs to be completed. They usually appreciate the reminder anyway.
• It sounds so silly now, but I learned how to write clear, respectful emails when I worked for the closed-captioning company. I watched my coworkers get reprimanded, and even let go, because they were seen as disrespectful and a disruption to the workplace. My first managing editor was surprised and impressed with my ability to convey clear, direct information to authors in a respectful way. Though, it is much easier to do in my current environment than it was before.
• As an editorial assistant, my job is more admin than actual proofreading. I still get to interact with authors and I look forward to the day I can implement these skills on the job again.
• The most relevant aspect of my work ethic that I picked up from my previous experience was my mission-driven attitude. It wasn’t specific to my current organization’s mission, but ultimately, I decided a long time ago during my internship that I wanted to help people. I loved working with those authors and artists, and that was when I knew I wanted to work somewhere that made a real difference in people’s lives. It sounds simple to me, but scholarly publishing was the natural next step for me.

In scholarly publishing, I can clearly see a career track in which I end up using the writing and editing skills that I’ve always fostered in the long run while also working to disseminate scientific discussion and communications for a better future for all of us. That being said, I’ve had many interests throughout my life. This is just one track that I chose to be on for a while. It is a massive reason why I got hired. My background is diverse, and I clearly exhibited the ability and desire to learn on the job. If you’re considering a career shift, don’t be afraid to lean into whatever background you have. This career shift for me proved that my diverse background was only a benefit to me. And in the future, whether I continue growing in scholarly publishing or if I decide to go back to creative writing, or even if I decide to become a veterinarian, the confidence I’ve gained interacting with my peers in this field has been life-altering.

Origin Editorial is now part of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd., the industry leader in editorial, production, online hosting, and transformative services for every stage of the content lifecycle. We are your source for society services, market analysis, intelligent automation, digital delivery, and more. Email us at info@kwglobal.com.