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 I was thrilled when I found out that I’d gotten a summer internship with Penguin, and this summer has turned out to be everything I hoped for and more. I’m an intern with the Penguin Speaker’s Bureau, and it’s been a great experience. The department was started in 2006 to develop author speaking engagements, and it is constantly evolving and improving. In-house speakers bureaus are a relatively new component of the publishing industry, and Penguin’s was one of the first and already has tons of great authors on its roster. I love being a part (however small) of this new development in the publishing industry, and I also love seeing all the speaker requests we get from people who are so excited about the books.

From the first hour of orientation, I could tell this wasn’t the typical corporate environment. Everyone is just so nice, and everyone I’ve talked to really cares about books and seems genuinely happy to be here. I’d never worked for a big company before, so I didn’t know what to expect in terms of bureaucracy. But Penguin manages to minimize the red tape while maintaining some excellent corporate perks (reduced entrance fees to Six Flags are perfect for the intern three-day weekends).