Author: Megan Zimmerman, 2nd Year English MA Student
I ended my internship with Uwe and Triada US Literary Agency back in July, but I find that it’s something I can’t stop talking about. To anyone who will listen or who shows interest in my work as an intern, I’ll gush about my time with the agency and Uwe. I truly feel like it was an invaluable experience and I would absolutely recommend someone to the internship position if they were interested in a goal career path similar to mine. I still speak to Uwe, on occasion – although we both know I could do better – and I enjoy hearing about his adventures as a literary agent. (He recently went to the Frankfurt Book Fair!) He doesn’t know it yet, but I’ll soon be reaching out to him for help regarding my experimental project for this class.
Since I took the non-traditional route with my internship by taking it during the summer rather than during the semester, I had a lot of time to think about what I would want to do for my capstone project. Prior to the summer, I met with Dr. Wright to discuss my internship and she told me to brainstorm ideas with the quick mention of maybe connecting my work at the internship with my (at the time) future work in History and Structure of the English Language. I didn’t know what to expect from the HSEL class at the time, but one word in the syllabus for the class stuck out to me all through my internship: syntax.
Between that word bouncing around my head and the fact that I had dealt with so many genres at my internship, I came into this semester knowing I wanted to somehow connect the two. I was lucky to have Dr. Wright as my sounding board as I bounced half-formed ideas off of her after one of our first internship meetings. With my barely articulate thoughts, Dr. Wright was able to help me tease out the idea for my project that I couldn’t quite grasp previously. I became excited upon her verbalizing it for me: sentence diagraming of genre work to determine if sentence structure differed from genre-to-genre.
It’s an experimental project to be sure, something that I could probably fit into the scientific method, but it’s a project I’m excited to undertake. If my hypothesis works out, it has the potential to grow and further knowledge about genre. If it doesn’t, then I have a passion project to show off. Whether a hypothesis is proved or disproved, either end result is important to further knowledge.
Building Bridges 