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Internship Program

The English Department sponsors a limited number of academic-year internships for advanced graduate students. Through this training opportunity, the Department aims to facilitate focused, substantive career exploration and the purposeful development of transferable skills. 

Students who are selected to pursue an academic-year internship do so in lieu of a GSI placement, with identical remuneration including tuition, fees, Grad Care, and stipend. All academic-year interns are required to enroll in a one-credit professional development practicum during the fall semester. 

By integrating internships into the academic year, developing curricular support for interns, and offering compensation commensurate to a GSI appointment, the department affirms our commitment to preparing students for a wide range of humanities careers, as well as our fundamental belief in the broad social and professional value of advanced training in English.

Internship opportunities include the following: 

There is also the opportunity for students to initiate and design their own internship experience. 

 

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Jeremy Glover - University of Michigan Press

I received a professional development grant during the summer of 2020 to work with the University of Michigan Press. During this internship, I worked mostly with the acquisitions department but also with marketing and production. This gave me a broad overview of the publishing industry, as well as the skills and values needed to turn a book from an idea in an author’s head to an actual physical object. My experience also allowed me to think about scholarship at a more macro level. Instead of situating myself, as a scholar, in various conversations, I got to consider what conversations constitute a field. It was very helpful to have that view of scholarship while doing prelims. Since that first internship at UM Press, I've done another internship for them and also served as an assistant editor for the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning

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Carlina Duan - MQR

I interned for Michigan Quarterly Review, working as an education coordinator for their literary journal. During my internship, I read through past archives of MQR and designed new literary arts lesson plans featuring archival content from previous issues. I interviewed local Southeast Michigan educators to get their perspectives on their needs and hopes for literary arts curricula, and based my lesson plans off of these conversations. I also collaborated with MQR staff, who offered invaluable feedback on my lesson plans and how they might better reach local and national readerships. This internship was an amazing experience: it provided an immersive entrance into the worlds of creative writing education and literary arts production. It also further fleshed out my understanding of the publishing world, and invited me to stitch together my creative and academic identities in a hands-on way.

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Amanda Greene - QRSI

The summer internship and professional development grant enabled me to participate in the Qualitative Research Summer Intensive (QRSI) training program at the University of North Carolina’s Odum Institute. While the program was only a week long, I came away with practical skills in addition to new ideas about how to orient myself towards the non-academic job market.

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Christie Allen - Rx for Reading Detroit

I am writing to report on my summer 2016 internship with Rx for Reading Detroit, which was sponsored by the University of Michigan English Department. Rx for Reading is a non-profit organization, associated with the University of Detroit Mercy, that promotes literacy among children and youth in the city.

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Cecilia Morales - Write a House

As an intern for WAH, I was working closely with co-founder Sarah Cox, helping her in any way I could with the daily upkeep of the organization. Because WAH is still a relatively young organization (founded in 2011), it is still very much in the midst of developing and stabilizing, and it was exciting to be able to aid in this growth. While doing so, I was able to observe what it takes to run a small nonprofit while also learning a lot about the particular needs and challenges of the city of Detroit. The work I did for WAH was challenging, interesting at times and tedious at others, but my biggest take-aways from this experience came from simply being privy to the inside-circle of the world of nonprofits and coming to a deeper understanding of the ways in which my knowledge and skills can serve me in a professional or managerial space.

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Dory Fox - Zingerman's

This summer I got the opportunity to write for the Zingerman’s marketing team. This opportunity was identified and generously funded by the English department. The following is my reflection on the experience: 

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Jennifer Gonzalez - Latinx

For the length of my professional training fellowship, I worked with a new Michigan-based Latina/o advocacy nonprofit called Latinx1 Leaders for the Enhancement of Advocacy and Development (LLEAD). From August to December of 2017, I worked directly with the president, the state board, and Lansing chapter board members, as well as with many rank-and-file members and non-members. As a new organization, LLEAD has many competing priorities, including obtaining 501(c)3 status, expanding its number of local chapters, and carrying out strategic planning. It quickly became clear, though, that my graduate study skills of critical thinking and project development and my research background in Latinx studies and gender and sexuality could be best used for one specific project. 

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Joshua Kupetz - The Offing

For six weeks during this summer, I interned for The Offing, an online literary magazine that foregrounds work by and about marginalized communities. While the journal began as a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Offing is transitioning to an independent basis after a very public fallout with the previous Editor in Chief. I was brought on as an Assistant Director of Fundraising, and my task was to research and propose an online fundraising campaign. Having had no prior experience in publishing, my research into long-term objectives such as grants, as well as sustaining short-term objectives such as crowd funding, introduced me to many of the practical concerns that structure the life of a literary journal. I produced a comprehensive crowd funding plan based on the Patreon platform—which is basically Kickstarter for “creatives” with a focus on sustaining memberships instead of one time donations—which the organization has just begun to evaluate. 

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