Are you a University of Central Florida student looking for editorial experience? An internship with the Florida Historical Quarterly is valuable for students looking to enter a PhD program and careers in journal editing.
Want to know what an intern’s experience is like? Here are some daily snapshots from the blogs of three recent Florida Historical Quarterly interns:
Starting Out:
- “Working at the FHQ means working with fellow historians as a team. One cannot be a hermit-historian, with only books for friends…I must keep in mind that any comments and corrections that I make, and any clarifications that I request, will be seen by the editors and the authors.” – Daniel Velasquez
- “My first week at the Quarterly, having partaken in a number of different tasks, begun being familiarized with the process of publishing an academic journal, and learned more about the world of academic, has thus been a profitable experience already.” – Jared Muha
A Typical Day:
- “I am gathering…the database into something more user friendly that could possibly be put on a website to help other students and find and contact professionals that focus, to some extent, on Florida topics. This is all still a working progress.” – Tyler Campbell
- “One of the things required of checking footnotes is checking the sources that the authors use in their articles. As such, part of my job is to find the sources used in an article and check what was cited from them. I actually like this a lot! I am actually familiarizing myself with the historiography of that particular historical topic.” – Jared Muha
Learning Experiences:
- “I also learned this week that there is a huge variation in the use of commas in the academic world and that the age of the writer and the writers style can completely change the way an author uses commas within their work. It’s something I have never considered before. The rules with commas are much more fluid than I previously thought.” – Tyler Campbell
- “I never realized how much work went into the creation of a historical journal until I began working at the Florida Historical Quarterly. As a graduate student in history, I am used to reading articles about various historical topics for my research and as class readings. But I never stopped to think of the work and effort involved to bring those articles to the public.” – Daniel Velasquez
Unique Opportunities:
- “This week with the Quarterly I worked on pulling everything together…for the [Shofner] lecture this coming Monday. I am sure it will be a very successful event and we spent most of the week in preparation for it.” – Tyler Campbell
- “I have also been working on figuring out the Winter issue’s cover page. Each issue’s cover page features an image that is relevant to the articles in the issue.” – Daniel Velasquez
Final Conclusions:
- “I am so grateful for this opportunity that I have been given and I am also grateful for all of the things I have learned through it that I could not have gotten anywhere else. The proof editing skills I have gained will help me in my writing as I go on to a graduate program.” – Tyler Campbell
- “Dr. Lester, Dr. Murphree, and I celebrated having finalized the seventeenth-century special issue. Dr. Lester quipped that we need never look at the issue again, lest we find more errors. She was joking, of course; after so much work, I can’t wait to get my copy in the mail to see the final product.” – Daniel Velasquez
Do you have experience editing a historical journal? What were some of your favorite moments or learning experiences? Leave a comment below!