Month: February 2023

For the first major assignment in this course we were instructed to do a “mini-internship”. For my mini-internship I worked with The Carter Center’s communication team. Jim Kavanagh, a senior writer in The Carter Center Office of Communications, assigned me to a story about the Center’s internship program that has remained virtual. He gave me a word count of 400-500 words and provided me with a few references to reach for interviews. I worked on the editing with Kavanagh and went through multiple revisions of this piece. Bellow is the final version of this article.

The second assignment in this course was a journal article submission. For this, we were instructed to select a journal to submit to and review a piece we had already done in another class to fit a journal’s submission requirements. I selected a paper I had written for National Politics (POLS 100) that I took freshman year. Despite getting the chance to work on research I had done two years ago, I learned how to communicate with a journal to get that work published, a skill that I found to be more valuable than actually learning how to revise my previous work. We spent a lot of time working on writing cover letters and abstracts to submit to our journal of choice. I learned about the best way to introduce myself and my work, in terms of helping my credibility. Bellow is the market analysis, cover letter, cover memo and abstract, four elements of this assignment.

The final project in this course was a book proposal assignment. I wrote a proposal for a book called “Guide to Voting for College Students” and marketed it to be published with MIT Press. The book is a voting “how-to” guide that is aimed at helping college-age students navigate elections. The most challenging part of this assignment was flushing out my ideas and coming up with a specific chapter outline. This was difficult for me because I had so many ideas for what I wanted my book to discuss that when it came time to figure out what I would actually include, I had to cut it down and select the topics that were most important for the purpose of the book. I was able to create a book cover for the proposal, something I never thought I would do since I am very far from being creative or artistic. However, I loved the design that I came up with for my book! In the end, I am very happy with how my book proposal turned out and learned a lot from the process of developing it and selecting a publishing company. Attached is my full book proposal.