Alumni - Nina O’Reilly - MA Publishing

In autumn 2015 I made the move from Dublin to Oxford for the MA in Publishing at Brookes. I decided that, rather than my original plan of pursuing a career in academia, I would like to work in academic publishing instead. A year and a half on, after first working as an intern, I am now an Editorial Assistant for Bloomsbury Academic’s Digital Division, a an exciting position that I really enjoy.

As well giving me a strong foundational knowledge of publishing, the MA at Brookes also crucially showed me how strong the competition for entry-level positions is in this industry. Thus the Editorial & Digital internship at Bloomsbury really opened a huge door for me.

In this internship I worked with five different Humanities lists providing editorial and administrative support for projects from proposal stage all the way to print. The internship was very hands-on; I was constantly developing my skills and knowledge of the Academic editorial process. The team were also great to work with and were always offering to teach me new things and trusted me to carry out a wide-variety of tasks for them. As well as my day to day tasks I also helped out with my colleagues at a few Academic conferences, which were insightful and enjoyable experiences.

For the digital aspect of the internship, I assisted the Senior Commissioning Editor for Philosophy in the development of a new digital product. Having chosen the Digital Strategy option module at Brookes, it was great to see the digital processes I had learned about in practice in real-life. Digital innovation is a huge part of Academic Publishing today, so it was invaluable to be able to work on this project.

In applying for the newly created Editorial Assistant position here for Digital Resources, I was able to draw on my experience not only from the internship but also from the MA course at Brookes too. Digital resources are a very important part of what we do here at Bloomsbury, and helping to develop highly-visual and interactive platforms is exciting and challenging work. The internship between Brookes and Bloomsbury served as a great stepping stone to my publishing career and I would encourage everyone to consider applying for it!

Posted on 03 Apr 2017 around 10am