The past couple weeks have reminded all of us on the course that we are, indeed, students, and sometimes students have to do crazy things like hand in work and take tests. In the past couple weeks we've had a Marketing test, a proofreading test (part of Editorial), and a Production assignment.
I've said before that Marketing is the class that requires the most work, which remains true. Due to this fact, there was a general sense of panic before the test, despite the fact that we were allowed to use notecards. In the end though, the test went better than I expected. The test had 15 questions, and we had to answer 9. This ended up being a good thing as I had absolutely no idea what one of the questions was talking about, so I was quite pleased to skip that one. Most of the questions were about things like the marketing mix, push/pull, competitive intelligence, stuff like that. And the best part was, my work experience actually helped me with the test (specifically on the competitive intelligence question). So it went well, and the results were emailed to us on Friday. I got a 74%, which is a distinction/A, so I'm quite happy.
No word yet on results from the Production assignment, but my seminar leader said Adrian (the main Production guy) wanted all the results back by Friday so he could put everything together, so I expect to hear about that soon.
And last week we had our proofreading test! This consisted of one reading against copy exercise (this is where you take what the typesetter has done and compare it with the original, so see if the typesetter has introduced new errors and if there are any stray errors left over by the author), one cold read (just reading through it on its own) of a children's story, a cold read of an AI (Advanced Information) sheet, and 10 questions about random stuff we've been learning. I found the test quite jarring as this was only the second or third time in my life I haven't finished a test early (with the Marketing test, I was one of only three people to leave early). Well, to be fair, I did get through everything with still about 15 minutes to spare, but a proofreading test isn't like other tests as there's no set end: just because you've gone through the entire extract doesn't mean you've caught all the mistakes. So I finished early, then went back through stuff, which was a good move as I picked up several things I'd missed before. No idea when we'll hear back about our marks for that.
Work experience continues. Last week instead of doing journal homepages, Fellow Student and I were doing some social media marketing stuff (Facebook and Twitter), which I found a bit odd as we're working in editorial, not marketing, but most of our work seems to be more of a marketing thing any way. It was not the most thrilling thing to do in the world, but it was nice to have a change. Tomorrow I suspect we'll be back on journal homepages. We have 4 more weeks (days) left in the placement.
My Editorial group continues to meet every week to work on our project, though it's getting to the time where we're going to have to start working a bit harder. The project is to come up with a new title/project proposal for a UK publisher (any UK publisher, and the title/project should fit their list). I quite like the idea my group is working with; we're sending a couple representatives to speak with Beverley about it this week, with the hope being that she'll like the idea too and we won't have to start from scratch.
Our Wednesday morning random lectures have become themed: now we're talking about research methods for our dissertations. I find this only semi-useful as I fully plan on doing a major project instead of a dissertation, but oh well
Friday was our deadline to register for next semester's modules (well, to be fair, we can still change what we want to do, we just have to go through a more complicated process to do so). I'm doing the straight-up MA in Publishing (as is the vast majority of the course), so I can't speak to different requirements for the MA in Digital Publishing people or any other the others, but next semester, we all have to take New Product Development, which leaves us with two options. I've chosen International Publishing Management (run by Clare, who also runs the Marketing class), and Rights Management (run by Beverley).
Post-grad life continues to be hectic, but I'm still enjoying it. It's hard for me to look back at my time as an undergrad and make a specific list of things I learned; I could do it, but it'd be a bit of a struggle and I think a lot of the things I learned I didn't really notice learning, so I wouldn't list them any way. But now I'm just over half-way through my first semester as a post-grad, and it would be impossible for me to list everything I've learned, simply because there's so much.
Back to work experience tomorrow. We have a Publishing talk on Tuesday night, an OPuS event on Wednesday night, my flat is celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday night, and Friday a group of us are going to see Harry Potter in the afternoon, then there's a big publishing house party that night. It's going to be a busy, busy week.
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