Crazy Spring

Tons has happened in the last 6 weeks. Since I am a bit lazy I will be doing a quick update in bullet points:

• The packager took it's time and I had to go back for a second interview (for an unpaid work placement) in May. But that went well and I was supposed to start last Friday (reason why I did not start see below).
• Uni was crazy. The first two weeks in May I had all my final presentations and group projects due. Over the Easter week basically all I was doing was research and typing up assignments, making PowerPoints and other fun stuff.
• What made those last two weeks in class even more crazy was the fact that despite my better judgment I applied to five jobs over the Easter week. I panicked a bit because some  people already got jobs on my course and most of them had started applying. So even though I wanted to wait till June to start the application nightmare, I fired off five applications to jobs I really wanted. And surprise, surprise, I got invited to three interviews! That had never happened! It was all great and fun, but it meant that I couldn't commit to group work as much as I liked. But my group was great and picked up all my slack while I was off interviewing or preparing for interviews. All three of them were right in the last week where we had our most important projects due. One job I didn't get (though the interview was fun, my interviewer had her dog in the office and he was a cutie!), one I got after the first interview and for the other one I had to go to a second interview. But that was the one I really wanted. And I got it in the end! Yay! Never in a million years would I have thought I would get a job before finishing my degree. So then I had to do something I had never done before in my life: I called the first job and turned it down. Weird.
• The job I ended up taking wanted me to start straight away. So I spent the last weekend finishing off assignments. Crazy busy. I don't think that they are any good, but I handed them in on Monday and was able to start on Tuesday. It's nice to only concentrate on work and not have to worry about uni.
• That said, I still have to write a dissertation. Not sure how to handle that with full-time work, but I'll figure something out.

Now you are pretty much caught up. I was pretty concentrated on uni and getting a job the last few weeks. And I think it paid off nicely. 

Now I want to relax a bit and just hang out. The last few weeks I went to a few birthday parties (including my own ;-)  which was really nice. It's weird, because I go straigth to a job from uni, I did not have any downtime, or time to figure things out. Now I just have to find a new rhythm again. But I'm very excited!!! 

Already went out clothes shopping. It's so nice to know that there is a paycheck waiting for me at the end of the month. And another nice thing is that I got this job before I ran out of all my savings. I feel very lucky with how things have turned out.

Things will probably still be pretty busy with work and dissertation looming. But I'm gonna enjoy it. Now I'm just hoping that I will get through probation fine and then there is no stopping me!

Half way through second placement

Apologies in advance. I will be talking about a placement again. Sad but true, not much else going on in my life right now. So if you are really not interested in what I'm doing at a publisher, feel free to skip this post completely.

For everyone else, this last week I was at an academic publisher out in Basingstoke. When I accepted the placement I looked at a map and figured it wouldn't be that much further than Wimbledon (where I used to work). Took me just over an hour to get to Wimbledon, so clearly going to Basingstoke should be 1 1/2 hours tops. WRONG! Takes just over two hours door to door. Four hours commute every day. I'm beat. Stayed in bed till after 12 today. I felt so tired and just couldn't face the day. But that's all the negative there is to say about this placement!

Now to the positive. Everyone is very welcoming and wanted me to get a real experience of what it's like to work for them. My main contact Steve was very kind and showed me around the office and made introductions. He had read my CV and I mentioned that I would like to see production and rights. So he put me into production the first week and next week I will see rights. He also said that I will be working on real projects and not be used as a 'labourer'. More sweet!

So I wandered off to production to work with Matt, their main electronics guy. I basically helped out on the ebook front, which was really interesting. Got a list with 1000 backlist titles that they want to convert to ebooks and then I was let loose onto their system to chase down old pdf or any other file I could find. Matt had kindly already collected the most recent ones (200) and I found about 600 more. So we were only missing 200 at the end. He told me that those now had to be ordered up in hardcopy, scanned and then converted into PDFs. Was really relieved when I found out that I wasn't going to be the one who is going to scan them. Phew. The next task was to update their database. Basically I went through their most recent titles and added on their database lines and tickboxes that would enable them to check whether ebook files had been ordered and received. All of this doesn't sound really exciting. But I thought it was pretty cool. Plus Matt explained everything nicely and I got to ask a million gazillion questions. He was also so kind to be my interviewee for my thesis plan that I have to write up sometime soon. The last day I spend on the office ipad checking if some of their earlier titles looked ok on the ibook. Overall an amazing week. It thankfully also showed me that there is not only one publisher I could work at and have fun at, but there are plenty!

Next week I will be in rights. Not sure what I will be doing, but I was already told that they have a project for me. So it should be fun. But I'm glad it is only two weeks as the commute is horrible. I got to talk to one of the production girls who seems to be in charge of new hires. She was very excited that I want to work in production and was already starting to plan ahead on how I could fit in. That was really lovely, but I told her that I want to work in London. Darn. That might otherwise have been a brilliant opportunity to cheat myself into a job. Well, at least I'll have a good reference.

This weekend I will be working on an assignment for uni. Urgh. Hate working and studying. Really wanna get it all done and over with and go back to full-time work (never thought I would say that!). Uni is all nice, but I love those days when I can just come home from work and don't have to study or read.

Ok, back to my sales assignment. Need to manipulate figures on excel...

Placement Mania

I am back full swing with uni life. Can't believe that already three weeks have passed. After another two weeks I will go on placements full-time. Can't wait for that! I didn't get the placement that I originally wanted with a packager in their production department. They just wouldn't make up their mind whether they wanted someone for five weeks, which is the required length of my placement. So I applied to a couple of other places. Finally ended up with a five week stint at a medium sized publisher in their sales team and two weeks at a big publisher in their outsourcing arm.

The latter one I am really excited about. We had the guy who runs it come in last term and tell us about what they do. They basically do all aspects of publishing, but for other companies. Usually smaller publisher will outsource to them and they then either do something in-house or outsource themselves. What I love about it is how global it is. The job could go out to companies anywhere in the world. For some clients they have set production schedules, where a magazine would be send to the Philippines via email, they would do the copy editing, then it would go on to India for illustration work, would be send on to Europe for putting it together in it's final form, then send to the publishers in the States, they would approve it, and then send it on to their printers. Amazing!

The placement in sales is not as exciting. I'm not sure yet whether I'm in International sales or UK sales. Hoping for international, but I shall see. I don't mind it, I might even start working in Sales when I get done in the summer. I just would have preferred to get some production experience as I still think I would prefer to work there. Plus, I have experience in a buying role which already sets me up for a job in sales and I wanna avoid being pushed into this one direction without the chance to try something else. Come summer I will be happy to accept ANY job, but until then I wanna keep my options open!

In other news, I love my new study group! They are so different then my last one. People actually do work without being pushed and volunteer for tasks. It's amazing! We are so far ahead in our projects, I'm really starting to relax and enjoy my studies again. Stress-free uni, who would have thought that is possible?

Speaking of which, gotta go and study some more now. Reading this really interesting book about ...drumroll please... publishing!

This is frustrating

So the last term went out with a bang. Exams, food, drinking and one day of leisure. And now this. Been back in classes since last Monday and no time to breathe. All the projects for the semester got dumped on us, I had my placement on Friday and the weekend was spend like this:

That's right. Sitting at my bf's office (because it's nice and quiet and has free coffee) studying! I read through someone else's dissertation and through about half a text book and did some maths exercises.

Today, thankfully, I only have one class. But after class my group is meeting to discuss ideas on two projects. We are supposed to acquire/commission books. But of course we have to come up with the ideas. Uh, not really good at that. Did I mention I don't wanna be an editor and don't really care about that part? Well, at least there are four other people in my group who ALL wanna be editors. So I figure it would be good practise for them ;-)

Here's to the next weeks calming down a bit...

It's not unusual

Today I'm doing something very unusual. I am blogging, but haven't read any of the blogs I'm usually following for about a week. There are exactly 366 unread posts. A crushing number. So tempted to just press the 'mark all as read' button. But I can't. Still want to read them all. Just don't know when.

It's really crazy. Today is Sunday and I feel like I need a weekend. Was doing work for uni all day yesterday and today. I don't see the workload decreasing any time soon. All I want is a day I don't have to think about reading or assignments. To be fair. This week I took on more than I needed too. I want to apply to a publisher for work experience. As my lecturer pointed out time and time again how important it was to talk about some of the publisher's book in the cover letter I ventured out on Friday to find some. One would think this is not a big problem. But I picked a fairly small publisher with only five employees. It took some time but I finally found a book they published. And lucky me it was neither very long, only about 200 pages, nor was it boring. I actually enjoyed it. So it was easy to throw in a sentence about in the cover letter. Hope it makes a difference. After all, this is for an unpaid work experience. I will read through it one last time tomorrow morning and then send it out. Hopefully I will get a positive response!

Otherwise just playing it day by day. The healthy lifestyle is suffering a little bit with all this stress. But I did manage to go running once a week so far. I won't push myself. If it only happens once a week then that is great. Evening meals have also deteriorating a bit. As bf is doing lots of overtime at the moment, neither him nor I are particularly interested in preparing a proper dinner. Had pizza and Chinese delivered this week more than once. At least we're doing something for the British economy.

Anyway, will enjoy my two hours of free time today before falling to bed all exhausted. Hope everyone had a great week! Will try to update more often from now on.