Taking Initiative

University of Dreams (yes, that's the name of the program I'm on) would be so pleased to know that their bi-weekly survey inspired me to take initiative. As I mentioned in my post, "Some Days I'm Up and Some Days I'm Down," the survey asked us to give examples of when we'd taken initiative, and it got me to realize that I hadn't taken a lot of initiative. So I decided that I should probably ask my immediate boss, Alex, to go to lunch with me so that we could discuss the internship, etc.

Yesterday I told myself that I had to ask him before I went to lunch that day. For some stupid reason, I felt really awkward about asking him so I waited until the last possible minute. (I always meet my coworker Joanna for lunch in the office kitchen at 12:30 and I have to buy a sandwich before then, so I waited until like 12:25 to ask him.) I sounded as awkward as I felt, I'm sure. I said really quickly, "Hey Alex? Uh, do you think we could maybe go out for lunch sometime this week to talk about how my internship's going since it's half over?" He looked up from his computer and took a second to process what I had blurted out seemingly out of the blue (little did he know that I'd been planning it for like twelve hours). "Yeah, sure," he says. "Okay, cool, what day works for you?" "Uh...tomorrow?" "Okay, sounds good, can I take my lunch break now?" He took another second to process this abrupt shift in topic. "Yeah, sure." "Okay, bye." And I picked up my purse and jetted out of there. (I really don't know why that was so awkward for me; I think I just made it a really big thing in my head for no good reason.)

So today we went to eat and fortunately, our conversation went well. I thought to myself (once again, thinking things over too much) that I should probably start the conversation with something non-work-related so that it could seem friendly and casual. But then I was thinking, "Oh man, what in the world should I say?" Fortunately, as we were walking out of the office, I noticed his copy of Ulysses sitting on his desk and remembered that he was trying to read it again. (The last time he tried to read it, he was nineteen, I found out today.) Of course, talking about books is always a good conversation topic for me (I talked with Ellen, the new intern, about Tess of the D'Urbervilles yesterday, which was also good). Anyways, so Alex and I talked about Ulysses for a little bit before seguing into the internship discussion. For one thing, I wanted to know how he thought I was doing because I was a bit irrationally afraid that I wasn't doing very well. But he told me that he thought I was doing really well. He said that the information I've been finding is good, and the introductory material I've been writing is really good. So that was encouraging.

Then I also asked him if there would be any way for me to learn more about what goes on in the company as a whole. I think I may have unintentionally described the stuff I'm currently doing as "laborious," which I didn't mean to do because I didn't want to sound like I was complaining or unhappy with the internship. But he said that he'd talk to Tej (the top dog) about me possibly doing a few more tasks. He also said that usually interns don't get the full perspective because they're only there for such a short time. Some do a little bit of everything (and never get to know fully about each stage) and some do a lot with just one thing (which is more what I'm doing).

We also talked a little bit about what I might want to do within the field of publishing, which I wasn't really expecting to talk about. But he seemed genuinely interested in helping me figure out a bit of what I would like to do. I told him that, at my last internship at CBE, I really liked getting to pull everything together and organise it according to 'my' vision for the project. He said that then maybe I'd like to do something similar to what he does, which is production. I'd actually thought about production before, but I never really knew much of what it entailed. But apparently, at least Alex's production position at Anthem Press, involves a lot of carrying a project through to its finishing stages, etc. I think his position is a little bit of a hybrid between production and editorial because so much of the copyediting and lower levels of editing are done by freelancers (because Anthem is such a small publishing house). So he would do some of the 'higher' stages of editing, maybe. He also asked me what my 'ideal' publishing job would be, and I didn't really know. But I said I thought I might like academic publishing (though not necessarily textbooks) or else high quality fiction (and not just mass market stuff, though that type of publishing house might be difficult to find).

He also mentioned briefly that, in a lot of jobs, you have to kind of work your way through the boring tasks to get to more interesting ones. Of course that's definitely true, but somehow I never really understood that. I guess it kind of made me realize why working folks always say, "Ah, to be able to go back to school! Those were the days!" I always scoffed at people like that and thought, "Either you don't remember how much work school is, or you didn't bother to work as hard as you probably should have when you were in school." But now I realize that maybe they weren't saying that school is EASY; they might have just been saying that school is more interesting and engaging than work. Because it seems like a lot of people's jobs involve mundane, boring tasks. Of course, school is sometimes boring too, but in college especially you get to think about ideas and creatively express your own ideas all the time. Anyways, I'm not pining for school yet, but I definitely want to go to grad school in a year or so. And that's partly what I hoped would come from this year off: that I would know FOR SURE that I'm going to grad school because I want to and not just because I didn't know what else to do with my life.

But anyways, I thought the conversation was really good. I felt like Alex was genuinely interested in what I had to say, and I thought our conversation about how the internship was going was really a 'genuine' (I don't know why that's the only word I can think of right now) exploration of what would be feasible that would helpful to both me and the company. And because of this conversation, I might get to do a few more tasks than researching for the guidebook. I also gained a new (and better) perspective on what I am doing (It's an important internal project for the publishing house that happens to involve a lot of grunt work), and I got a chance to think about what I might want to do within the field of publishing. And I got to know Alex a little bit better and find out (more than I knew before anyways) that he's a pretty great guy.