Alumni - Jennifer Krebs, MA Publishing

When I started my undergraduate degree I was enrolled as a Politics major. Going in, I already knew this wouldn’t be the place for me but it took me an entire year to realise that I should major in what I liked – and that’s how I ended up with an English degree. I was lucky that my university didn’t lock the English majors into future teaching careers – they encouraged exploring all aspects of the discipline (I declared an editing concentration), evoked interest in other careers and, most importantly, introduced me to the Brookes MA programme. I did my research and, just like all the statistics said, Brookes was the best publishing MA to get – and as a bonus I would get to head to Oxford. There is truly no better place to study books.

...

During my time on the course I took advantage of everything available to me. I took up an internship straight away, joined the SYP, became a student representative, was managing director during NPD (!), attended speaker meetings, and went to Florence for the postgraduate summer school. The course at Brookes gave me such invaluable insight into not only the British publishing world, but the inner workings of the industry as a whole. When I began my job search I knew that having the MA course on my CV was beyond beneficial and it definitely got my foot in the door at more than one publisher’s office.

I moved to London after the course and after a few internships I eventually ended up as a Sales Assistant for the UK office of The Perseus Books Group.  After several years here I have moved up to Marketing and Publicity Manager and I know that such quick advancement would never have been possible without the base knowledge of all aspects of publishing. The course provided me with real life experience and case studies, practical exercises, and taught me how to move in the publishing world. Choosing to study on the MA at Oxford Brookes was the best decision, career or otherwise, I have ever made and I encourage anyone on the fence to do the same.

Posted on 24 Jun 2014 around 9am