By | Kalie Caetano ’13
After Mac: Digital Media Specialist at Stanford University Press

Both creatively and academically, I developed as a writer in Mac’s English Department.  Any given day in my work as a digital media specialist, I’ll likely be writing in some capacity—whether in the form of 140-character attention-getters for Twitter or a full-blown blog post distilling academic content into approachable prose. I have to simultaneously grapple with big ideas and render them accessible in written communications.

The concepts I encountered in Mac classrooms have gone a long way in making me feel equal to the task of engaging big ideas, from the ethnographic study to the esoteric treatise. Through course readings I became familiar with the landscape of scholarship—who are the oft-cited names, what are the big ideas—all of which helps me keep pace with what Stanford is publishing, and how our authors are contributing to these conversations. One of the highlights of my job is feeling connected to a hub of thinkers and ideas, and unabashedly fangirling over the Press’ association with names like Carole Pateman and Judith Butler—names that would have meant nothing to me prior to Macalester, but now hold a certain rock star status in my mind (thanks to [Mac professors] Professor Z [Zornitsa Keremidcheiva] and Corie Hammers).

When I was a student, my work-study job at the Communications Office helped me develop a whole host of very useful technical skills to pair with the critical skills instilled by Macalester curricula. So many of the skills that I picked up there—blogging, working on webpages, producing videos and podcasts and a little dabbling here and there in graphic design—translate seamlessly to my current job. That experience also served as a launchpad for all of the internships that I completed during college—including working for a local indie publisher and an ad agency—which, taken altogether, furnished me with skillsets that seemed custom-tailored for this position at the Press.

Each workday usually entails generating content for the SUP blog, which usually takes the form of interesting excerpts from recent titles, guest posts from authors, and original pieces I write to showcase our books. All of those options involve me picking a book off the shelf at some point, either to draft interview questions for an author or to find a representative excerpt. For an English major this is, naturally, my favorite part of the job. Books about sectarianism in Bahrain, French women’s magazines in the Belle Époque, sociological treatises on how the blind perceive race—it’s all fascinating and even more gratifying to have access to the minds behind the work.

September 1 2014

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