Teachers' Pet
FROM PUBLISHING TRENDS (AUGUST 2004)
This
year’s 100 latte-lapping Columbia Publishing Course
graduates have bedazzled us once again with their
chronicles of caffeine-fueled overachievement. As in
years past, we offer you a sneak peek at publishing’s
next generation in the composite biographical sketch
below (all content has been taken from actual student
biographies). Columbia’s New York Career Day –
when the nouveaux literati will be unleashed on Manhattan
publishers – is set for Monday, Aug. 2, from
9 a.m. to noon at the Time-Warner Building. For more
information, call (212) 854-1898 or email publishing@jrn.columbia.edu.
A
descendant of bootleggers and sheep thieves and the
youngest of eight children, Ms. Student once told her
father that she wanted to be a backhoe operator. However,
wishing to emulate the polymaths who taught her, she
eventually sought diversity in her education, studying
philosophy, poetry, neurobiology, game theory, semantic
logic, and French (she also speaks fluent Spanish and
broken Portuguese). After a youth misspent writing dissatisfied
letters to teen magazines, she learned to intelligently
critique the media and the zeitgeist behind it, earning
the title “most likely to discover the meaning of life”
in her high school newspaper. Though her roots go back
to a commune in rural New Hampshire, where she and her
family resided as practicing Buddhists, she spent summers
interning at a major public relations firm, where she
was ostracized as “nerdy” for reading books during her
lunch break.
An independent woman with a passion for print — whether
it is milk cartons or manuscripts — she has written
a gothic novel about a traveling circus (while her friends
watched the circus, she interviewed the elephant handler
backstage), as well as articles on organic beef and
dietary fiber for EatingWell magazine. After
studying the Divina Commedia, this former nursery-school
talent show coordinator and vitamin salesperson realized
that she hated heaven and adored hell. She learned the
delicate art of interpersonal relations through dealing
with countless diva drag queens as co-organizer of Drag
Ball, Oberlin College’s largest student event.
Before graduating, she celebrated her appreciation of
Nietzsche’s philosophy and her love of hip-hop
in an essay recognized for academic excellence. In her
free time, she researched dolphins in New Zealand as
well as the history of the fish stick for her advisor.
She backpacked the Andes Mountains from Argentine Patagonia
to the Colombian Caribbean and rode horses through the
Inner Mongolian steppe, before setting off to work in
a converted chicken coop on a Tuscan hillside. Ms. Student
spent last summer interning at the Wylie Agency,
where, in the midst of a love-hate relationship with
the copy machine, she kept her cool with a little help
from Julia Child, who once said: “Learn to handle
hot things, keep your knives sharp and, above all, have
fun.”
©2004
Publishing Trends
