An Accidental Career
March 2009
Publishing, it has been said, is an accidental profession. It is unlike librarianship in that there is no publishing equivalent of an MLS. One gets into publishing in a variety of ways. As a result, there probably is no single typical publishing career path. Certainly the term “accidental” applies with a vengeance to my own publishing career.
I was, for example, quite unlike “Bill,” who roomed across the hall during my freshman year in college. Bill, also a freshman, was premed. Awake every morning at six, he was in the library when it opened half an hour later with his breakfast to go of crackers and fruit. The library was his base of operations for the remainder of the day, and he ventured forth only to attend class or eat. Every evening, while the rest of us were hanging around the dorm or the local pizza parlor, Bill was in the library studying. When it closed, he returned to the dorm, put in a pair of earplugs, and resumed studying until midnight or so, staving off fatigue by chewing on coffee grounds. This was Bill’s way of preparing for a medical career, and it seems to have worked. Last I knew he was a doctor somewhere in California.
My way was a bit more casual. Merely getting to college had been an adventure, and I spent most of my freshman year acclimating. College was a brave new world for an undersized (at that time), unhip little kid with no money from a small blue-collar New England town who suddenly found himself a thousand miles from home and surrounded by an infinitely more sophisticated and affluent set of peers. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at once, and career planning took a while to show up on my radar screen.
When it finally did, I responded by doing what any self-respecting undergraduate does when confronted with a difficult decision. I decided to go to graduate school. Initially, I hoped the career problem would go away. Later, I realized that if I simply stayed in graduate school long enough, I could become a college professor. And so voilà, a career plan!
Unfortunately, the plan didn’t work out. The intelligence was there but not the stamina. Three and a half years of graduate school later, I realized I badly needed a time out. And within a very few months, I found myself employed as a college sales rep by a major Boston publishing house, the result of a chance encounter with a downtown Chicago employment agency. Shortly thereafter I became an editor, and the rest is history.
Now, as I say, this is not exactly an example of career planning. It worked out nonetheless, and I, for one, am extremely grateful. But perhaps the thing I’m most grateful for is that it gave me an opportunity to work for Choice, where, although not immediately part of the academic world, I am part of the supporting infrastructure. Call me an academic voyeur, or perhaps a participant-observer. Whatever the label, I like it here, even if the journey was unplanned and my arrival a bit of an accident.—IER
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