This year’s Columbia Publishing Course (formerly the Radcliffe Publishing Course) Graduates are just as remarkable as ever. As is our annual tradition here at Publishing Trends, we’ve assembled one ultra-accomplished graduate profile from the most interesting and amusing parts of the students’ biographies. With the exception of some connecting phrases, all words are the students’ own.
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Born into a family of redheads, Typical Columbia Publishing Course Grad – oatmeal connoisseur and crossword puzzle enthusiast – has been an avid figure skater since the age of three, managed to see two Beatles in concert before her eighth birthday, and became interested in publishing at age ten, when she began crafting family newsletters on Microsoft Publisher while helping her parents become proficient in the English language.
Publishing Grad helped grade her mother’s students’ papers as a child and began editing her sister’s college essays while she was still in high school. She starred in a school theater production by standing on her head for eleven minutes. When she wasn’t onstage in her drama club’s musical productions, her free time was spent painting Disney scenes and miniature book covers. When she was still in high school, her novel was a quarterfinalist for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award: writer Jon Pineda characterized her work as “outlandish” and “promising.” As the founder of her own editorial services firm, she edited a six-hundred-page novel and taught English to more than fifty students from six countries.
Publishing Grad has visited 27 countries since 2011. She spent half her junior year in France, where she studied at Sciences Po Paris, attained fluency in French, and walked 333 kilometers on the Chemin de Compostelle. Last summer she trekked across Papua New Guinea to conduct fieldwork on a dying language, Ende, and create its first dictionary, while putting her eighteen years of ballet training to good use. This all culminated in her senior project: an online, interactive, illustrated novel exploring Jewish mysticism in 18th century Prague. Publishing Grad graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in music theory and history and performs in a semiprofessional choir in New York City.
When she’s not fighting the patriarchy, Publishing Grad can be found playing the ukulele, hiking, and listening to podcasts. She is working at teaching herself to speak Hungarian. Publishing Grad has studied Spanish, French, Chinese, and Russian and owns an extensive array of small houseplants and 7-Eleven discount DVDs. She considers herself a food enthusiast but hates the term “foodie” and hopes for a future career editing books while sipping chamomile from a mug she made herself. She is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom and lives with her three-legged cat, Sophie, and her Chicago Manual of Style.
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To find out more about seeing participants’ resumes (or to read the real biographies) please contact Columbia Publishing Course Assistant Director, Eric Greene at eg2928 at Columbia dot edu.
New York’s other major summer publishing course, New York University’s Summer Publishing Institute (SPI), has similarly talented alumni with rich backgrounds and interests. SPI will celebrate its 40th year next summer. To learn more about NYU’s eligible grads or about the program, contact Executive Director Andrea Chambers at (212) 992-3226 or andrea.chambers at nyu dot edu.
