Arielle Tait

October 23, 2015

The Business Side of Publishing

This past summer, I interned in the Wholesale & Retail department at Oxford University Press in New York City. My daily tasks included producing weekly publicity reviews for internal distribution, and managing the national salesforce account (a cloud computational enterprising device) to augment and standardize and the customer database. I also participated in a series of software training sessions. To gain greater awareness of departmental intersection, I met with employees from publicity, marketing, design, development, and editorial. Initially daunted by my first internship, especially in the oldest and largest university press in the world, I was pleasantly surprised to meet other undergraduate interns from Smith and Wellesley. Our alma maters created a bond that, for me, reaffirmed a strong existing network between women’s colleges. Most interesting for me was learning how a major organization such as Oxford University Press can reconcile business interests with a desire to proliferate forthcoming scholarship. I left this internship with warm feelings towards the publishing community, and a decision to pursue the Business Nexus Minor.