Cornell University Press-Graduate School partnership pushes limits of humanities doctoral career possibilities

Cornell University Press and the Graduate School have partnered to provide internship training experiences for graduate students. Incorporating experiential learning is less common in the humanities doctoral training paradigm, which tends to be more of a solo endeavor. To help students acquire more employment-ready skills that will help them in any future career, Jane Bunker, director of Cornell University Press, and Susi Varvayanis, executive director of Cornell’s Graduate School Careers Beyond Academia initiative, created an opportunity right at Cornell. Bunker shares, “When I was a doctoral student in philosophy I was assigned to work with the managing editor of an important journal published on campus. This experience proved an invaluable training ground from which I launched a career in scholarly publishing.”

To offer students the chance to experience firsthand what is involved in becoming an acquisitions professional at a university press, the partners designed a flexible on-campus summer internship. The inaugural fellow in the summer 2022 pilot was Ewa Nizalowska, a doctoral student in the field of government.