The Summer of Penguins

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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).

The summer is flying by, especially because each day at work is full of projects and activities. The Speakers Bureau is a growing, multi-faceted department, and my job is to help wherever it’s needed. My supervisors have been great about making sure I have enough to do while not overloading me with projects, and I do a wide variety of tasks. Among many things I’ve done this summer, I help keep track of author requests, create invoices and contracts, and have even learned some basic HTML to edit our website (shameless plug: www.penguinspeakersbureau.com). The Speakers Bureau is very involved with college freshman common reading programs, so I’ve also been asked for my input on a few different authors we’re considering. I even got go to a launch meeting with my supervisor, where the editors presented the books that are coming out next year.

I share my office with another intern, Kenneth, who works in Corporate Communications. It’s nice to have someone else to talk to during the day (hopefully, he feels the same way) and be able to compare notes on what’s going on in our respective internships. We’re also in the same core group, which is a group of interns that Human Resources puts together that has lunch together once a week. Every Wednesday, we compare notes on how we felt about the most recent episode of True Blood – and, of course, discuss working at our different departments! For example, Eleanor spends her days reading potential bodice-rippers at the New American Library, while Jessica spends her days preparing for audiobook productions. We also get to hear about the different departments during the weekly brown bag lunches, where two senior people in a particular area tell us about their work and give us a present of a book. For example, last week was the Children’s Editorial Brown Bag Lunch, where all the interns learned all about the editorial side of Young Readers and I picked up a copy of Thirteen Reasons Why, which I liked so much that I finished it in two days!

This has been a great internship experience, and I’m sad it’s almost over. But with all the books I’ve received during my weeks at Penguin, I’ll have material to remind me of my experience for quite a while!

Tamara O'Flaherty, Summer Intern, Penguin Bloggers, Penguin Books