Ever since I found out that books didn’t grow on trees, I’ve wanted to have a job that would let me work with them in some way. Or at the very least, to own a Beauty and the Beast-style Library. While I’m still working on the massive library, I’m excited to have started working on the career in books.
I studied Law at the University of Glasgow, and while that wasn’t directly linked to books, I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned that I do not want to work in Law, but I’m still glad that I worked hard and managed to get my degree since it was a challenging course that made me push myself. Once I realised that Law was not for me, I began to think about what other areas might suit me, and there was nothing so obvious as publishing, though it took me a while to find it.
I began to think about publishing as a career in my third year, when I was studying abroad at the University of Granada in Spain. I think the combination of studying Law and attempting to speak Spanish whilst doing so was enough to make me realise that whatever I chose to pursue as a career, I wanted to really love it. I have always had a love of travelling, and planes are an excellent opportunity for reading, so in my year abroad, I got to indulge both my passions and returned to Scotland convinced that I wanted to work with books, and sadly without even the slightest hint of a tan!
Once I did my research and applied to the University of Stirling, publishing seemed like an incredibly obvious choice for me, and my family, friends and everyone who has known me for longer than half an hour agreed that I should have thought of it long ago. Everything I’ve begun to learn at the University of Stirling has helped to convince me that I am in the right field, and that getting a Masters degree from Stirling will help me find a job in the publishing industry.
When I graduate, I hope to have gained the skills and experience that will give me a head-start in this competitive but exciting industry. I would love to work in editorial, and in fiction, but at this point, I am eager to gain as much experience of the industry as possible, to try to narrow down my options. I would like to think that when I graduate, it will be the start of a long career producing and publishing books, and I’m sure that I’ll be one step closer to the enormous, impractical library of my dreams.