Emma received funding through CSO for her unpaid summer internship at the Department of Education in Washington D.C. A similar opportunity is now available with the same supervisor as a Winter Term internship, deadline October 9. Read on to see if this is something that interests you, then apply directly on MOJO.
On my first day as an intern at the Department of Education as part of the Editorial, Printing, and Publishing Team, I walked into an unfamiliar world. My closest encounter with a cubicle had been while watching The Office, and coming from Vermont, I thought of the bus as something you could only catch twice a day. But there I was, in a new city, taking not just the bus, but the metro as well, and not going to just any cubicle, but a cubicle in the U.S. Department of Education, a mere block from the Capitol. To say I was intimidated is an understatement. But from the moment that I walked into the Department of Education and was met by my supervisor, Jackye Zimmerman, I felt welcomed to this new world, if still a little confused.
This confusion quickly disappeared as I was greeted with something I had become very familiar with at Middlebury: proofreading, or editing, as it is called when you proofread professionally. From the first day, I began to work on editing manuscripts, checking for errors of style, content, and grammar, learning the conventions of marking a manuscript as I went. My responsibilities extended to attending meetings with outside organizations, such as a meeting with Crayola to bring children’s art in their possession into an art display at the Department, and assisting at an event called Read to the Top, at which top members of the federal Administration read to children outside the Department.
By far the biggest project I was involved in was editing a book called the Guide to U.S. Department of Education Programs for 2009. I worked closely with a wonderful editor who was responsible for compiling the Guide and sending it to layout. In the course of working on this project, I read the 500-page Guide cover-to-cover three times, marking unclear phrasing, simple grammatical errors, or mistakes like incorrect ZIP codes. To clarify instances of unclear phrasing, I would contact representatives for particular organizations to ensure that the entries would be both accurate and understandable for the public. I then entered these corrections into an online database, learning basic html formatting as I went. In addition to the very lengthy work of finishing up the Guide, I edited other shorter manuscripts, such as a guide for a conference being held by the Office for Safe and Drug-Free Schools.
This internship was ultimately a very rewarding experience for several reasons. I can’t overemphasize how friendly and welcoming the staff on the editorial team are. I felt as if I had been working with them for a year after one week. Also, even as an intern, I never felt that I was given purposeless busy work. I was doing what I had gone to Washington, DC to do. I was editing real manuscripts. I will add a slight caveat here: this internship is certainly one where you get out what you put in. Hard work is really recognized and appreciated, and it will help you to move to more interesting, more intricate, and of course, harder assignments, but to get a valuable experience, you do need to be prepared to work hard. In addition, the experience of living in DC for an extended period of time as an intern was wholly enjoyable. While DC is a large city and it can be expensive, there are more free museums and concerts and plays and even movies than I could have hoped to see in the brief two months that I was there. I strongly recommend this internship to anyone interested in learning more about the world of publishing and editing and looking to gain an opportunity to actually engage in this work.