“You know, there’s no market for writers anymore.” “So, you’re going to be a teacher.” “I hope you like Ramen.” These are the three most common responses when I tell someone my major in college. While poking fun at English majors is one of America’s favorite past times, it is discouraging to have my main interest written off (pun intended) as something I cannot pursue as a legitimate career. To be fair, I’m not sure I want my profession to be based solely on my English major. Everyone seems to boil down my career options to two: teaching or living as a starving literary artist. With every interaction, I grow tired of defending my intellectual aspirations, trying to convince each person there are plenty of jobs for which I’m qualified. I’m comforted by the fact that there is plenty of demand in the labor market for someone who can communicate effectively and compose a nicely worded, professional email. In my experience as an intern at Swenson Book Development, I’ve learned three things about how to think about my major for launching my career: (1)  Consider other plans besides graduate school Getting a degree in the Romantics is not a viable option for earning a reliable wage. Writers do not make money, despite the countless hours of blood and ink put into their work. I thought graduate school might be an expensive and time-consuming way to guarantee myself a career, however, I’ve learned that if I want to pursue writing as…

Learning how to become an editor doesn’t happen overnight. Editing isn’t a college major. Some English degree programs offer a specialization in editing and publishing, most do not. There are a handful of certificate programs in professional and graduate degree programs, but the art of editing goes far beyond knowing grammar and the basics of copyediting. A full-time job as an editor isn’t an entry-level position and many recent graduates who might one day become editors have a difficult time navigating a route to this career goal. Many publishers won’t hire someone full-time who hasn’t already had an internship or two. And while they offer internships, typically they are unpaid and sometimes require a student register for college course credit. Instead of getting paid to work, they pay several thousands of dollars in tuition to gain valuable work experience. As a former college professor who supervised some of these internships, I would be disheartened to learn students had been given low-level tasks to perform which did not increase their skill sets or worse, had them perform tasks which the company ought to have hired an employee to do. Too often, interns provided an unpaid labor pool instead of an apprenticeship. Cultivating the next generation of editors requires mentors who can offer educational opportunities within a workplace setting. Instead of treating an intern as unpaid labor, cultivating their strengths and working on building new skill sets takes time and effort that goes beyond the regular work demands of running a business.…

This week Rowman & Littlefield releases Compassionate Critical Thinking: How Mindfulness, Creativity, Empathy and Socratic Questioning Can Transform Teaching by Ira Rabois. In his new book, Ira demonstrates how to use mindfulness with instructional effectiveness to increase student participation and decrease classroom stress, and it turns the act of teaching into a transformational practice. Many books teach mindfulness, but few provide a model for teaching critical thinking and integrating it across the curriculum. Ira Rabois recently retired from the Lehman Alternative Community School, a public secondary school in Ithaca, NY, where he taught English, Philosophy, History, Drama, Karate, and Psychology for 27 years. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan, a M.A.T. from SUNY-Binghamton, served in the Peace Corps, studied Zen and Japanese martial arts for 40 years with Hidy Ochiai, and took classes in meditation and Buddhist psychology at Namgyal Institute for Tibetan Studies, The Omega Institute with David Loy and Robert Thurman, healing meditation with the Consciousness Research and Training Project, and Proprioceptive Writing with Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon. Prior to his retirement, Ira Rabois began writing this book and contacted me in late 2012 for a professional assessment. After a round of revisions to his manuscript we began to work together on a book proposal and building his audience platform. He began to blog weekly and in 2014 was interviewed by Sasha Lilley on Pacifica Radio’s Against the Grain and by Tish Pearlman on WEOS/WSKG Radio’s Out of Bounds Radio. Ira’s book interested…