In Conversation with WRIT Students at St. Edward's I sit down with Phylicia Walker, Taheera Washington, and Jillian Norton. As senior Writing majors at SEU, they describe their aspirations, plans after graduation and their thoughts on the publishing industry. What is your dream job? How do you plan to get there? Phylicia: I want to be a literary agent…of course I want to write books, but I also need to eat. So ideally I would be a literary agent and edit while writing on the side. That’s what I really want to do because I actually enjoy the revision process and reading other people’s work. Taheera: Ideally I’d like to do something in advertising, but realistically social media. I’m open to anything; I have a lot of interests. I’m interested in publishing, I’m interested in advertising, but realistically I could see myself working right out of college in social media because that’s what my internship is in right now. Jillian: I have a big dream and a little dream. My big dream is to write YA novels in my own publishing house where accessibility is highlighted, disability is highlighted. I’m planning to go to publishing school in two years becasue I need money for that, so until I get to that point I’m planning to go into accessibility editing. Since I’ve spent so much of my life knowing what’s inaccessible, I’m going to use that to my advantage. I’d also like to go into narrative creation for video games. I am a creative writer at heart.
Do you have any jobs lined up? What are your plans immediately after graduation? P: I did get into the Columbia Publishing Course. Thank God. So after graduation I’ll be doing that from August to September. And afterwards I’ll probably focus in on job hunting so that I can afford to live. T: So I live in Dallas, and I’m probably going to move back home to Dallas because it is expensive to live in Austin, I’ll tell you that. I do want to start job hunting in April maybe, so I can have a job in May or June. J: The thing is accessibility editor as a title doesn’t really exist. There are people that want just editors in general and then when you get to the interview you can expand on how you have a speciality in accessibility editing. Everybody needs and editor, but what they mean by editor really varies. I’ve been scrolling through Indeed when I get bored, and just being like “That sounds fun.” Even things I’m not qualified for. You can sit there and make it sound like your qualified and then you just figure it out. That’s kind of the goal.
