I have had worse days, I’ll just say that.
I finished one review report and sent it to the commissioning editor this morning, then kind of unexpectedly did the same for another review report after lunch. Both are projects that I inherited from colleagues who’ve left the company — at their own choosing, and we were sorry to see them both go — and the latter is just one I’m helping to shepherd along until our new development editor starts work in a few weeks. In all honesty, there wasn’t a lot to be done, and I was just compiling the reviews and summarizing what they said. Of course, there weren’t a lot of reviews, so points of consensus were a little scarce on the ground. But the feedback was generally positive, and I think the book will do just fine without me.
I always feel a little weird talking about work here, in part because I’m not sure it’s interesting to anybody else but me. (Then again, I could probably argue that about two thirds or more of what I post here.) I like what I do, but the mechanics of it aren’t necessarily exciting. I do market research, look at courses and enrollments, send out questionnaires and surveys to instructors, get feedback on textbook chapters and pedagogy, look for points of consensus about the strengths we want to highlight and the weaknesses we need to address, and put this all into a format that’s hopefully easily digestible for the book’s editor and its author(s). I do other stuff, taking books from proposal to production to publication, but that’s the main thing. And while textbook research can be surprisingly interesting — I think about pedagogy more now than I ever did as a student — it’s probably not the kind of interesting that’s easily conveyed in a weblog post, much less that’s infectious.
Though, honestly, without all that, the most interesting thing that happened all day was that I forgot my MetroCard at home and had to buy a new one this morning. And if you thought collating and summarizing reviewer feedback was less than scintillating…
Anyway, it was a pretty good day.
I was running data models of applicant ranking for open competitions for majors and trying to figure out the contract programmer’s python code. And I registered a bunch of exchange students and went to a seminar on how to recognize a person in mental health distress.
Personally, I think it’s interesting to hear what other people do for a living, and what that actually means. Granted, you may not have a prof down the hall trying to grow vats of stem cells, or an effluent lab in your sub-basement, but I think what you do is pretty neat.