The question I was asked most as a child was ‘so you’re going to be an author when you grow up?’. This seemed like a logical idea; I read and wrote voraciously, and I thought that if I could do this for the rest of my life, that would be pretty much perfect. As I got older, I discovered that it’s not so easy to just become an author, and I still can’t find many jobs that involve me sitting and reading all day long. It took me a surprisingly long time to discover that publishing was a possible career option for me. For the longest time, I was so absorbed by the contents of the books themselves that I never gave much thought to how they actually came into being.

My interest in stories made me choose an undergraduate degree in English and Film Studies at The University of St Andrews. Although I enjoyed many aspects of my undergraduate degree, I learned that I did not want to work as an academic studying books for the rest of my life, but would still love to work around them in some capacity. I did as much work experience as I could to try and figure out where my interests lay, and did several placements at TV and newspaper businesses. They were fascinating, but they affirmed to me that working with books was what I definitely wanted to do.

After graduating this June, I stayed in St Andrews to work through the summer while applying for jobs and internships in publishing, and was finally rewarded with an internship at Alban Books in Edinburgh. It was an interesting and informative experience, and thankfully made me completely certain that I wanted to work in the publishing industry. Only late in the summer did I come across the MLitt in Publishing Studies at Stirling – I never knew such a thing existed, and right away I knew it was what I wanted to do. I never thought I would be going back to university to do postgraduate study, but I liked how vocational the course at Stirling seemed to be, and was excited by the prospect of learning real skills I could use in the workplace. I’m particularly looking forward to doing work experience at local publishing houses to get a feel for which area of the industry I would like to work in, and of course living in another beautiful part of Scotland.

Twitter: @kathrynhaldane