Penguin Teen

Sorry it took so long to answer this question!

What matters to me, as someone who hires interns, is the passion and knowledge that they have for young adult/children’s literature and any experience they might have that’s relevant to what I need them to do, not where they went to school. I would never speak directly on behalf of our human resources staff, because I don’t know how they sort through internship applications or how they decide what resumes to send along to me, but I get applications from people who are studying or graduated from all kinds of universities and colleges. It doesn’t matter very much to me, as a hiring manager; I have other priorities and things I look for.

That said, there are LOTS of people at Penguin who hire interns, and they might have different things that they look for. I can’t speak for them either. That may not be overly helpful, but I really wouldn’t worry about whether or not your degree comes from a “major” university; it comes from where it comes from. Focus on what matters more, which is relevant experience and excitement and passion for what you’d be working on.

Also, this a small piece of general advice for anyone heading in to a publisher for an interview: do your research! You should know going in what that publisher has recently published, who their big authors and books and series are, and you should have a sense of their publishing “personality” (every publisher has one). All such information is pretty easy to find with some Googling; all publishers have websites and, increasingly, social media presences that will give you a sense of these things. It requires a little work, but it makes a big difference.