Brighton, Dover, and My Internship(s)

Elizabeth Houde London Internship Program, England

Date

November 7, 2015

It's been a while.

So let me just say that I'm on the train to Edinburgh, so I have the time to write.

Let me tell you a bit about Brighton and my internship.

Brighton is great if you're into beautiful rocky beaches. I went with some friends from Arcadia. We went to the Brighton museum, went out on the pier, saw the Royal Pavilion, and ate fish and chips on the beach. All in all, a wonderful day trip. I recommend it to everyone.

I also went to Dover with the same group of friends and visited a castle, which was great. We went on tours of the underground tunnels of the hospital and army base used during WWII. We actually didn't end up seeing the cliffs even though that was kind of the goal. It was a great trip though.

My internships

I started out at a Public Relations (PR) company, which was enlightening. Public Relations is an interesting thing; to give you an idea of what it can be, I spent my days there writing blog content for companies, writing up print content, a lot of research, I monitored the feed of a picture contest, I inventoried samples from a new client--it was booze. Bottles and bottles of hard liquor. That was a weird day – and helped create charts of what was published for coverage. I'm glad to have had that experience. It's now on my list of things that I could do, but probably won't. My current internship is with a book publisher.

Let me just say that this is my favorite thing. I adore the editorial side of the publishing world. I spend most of my days sitting at my desk and reading manuscripts while I drink heinous amounts of tea. Afterwards, I write up reports that give a summary of them along with my impressions of it. It's honestly a bibliophile's dream. Not to mention the fact that I get free books, a perk of working at a publishing house.

And, to top it all off, everyone is so nice. I'm making friends with the other interns in the editorial section. They're both great. I had to break the news to one of them that Americans aren't as into Friends as people in the UK are. She was quite disappointed.

Side note: The word 'quite' is used here in the UK as the opposite of the US quite which means, generally, very. Here if they say that something is quite nice they're telling you that it's okay. Nothing special. I think I may've accidentally put it in a blog post for the PR company, so I've been very aware of it since.