The sub-sub-basement of Margaret Morrison Hall is lit with harsh fluorescents. Ancient type cabinets line the walls; the floor is bare cement. Michael Szczerban is “slugging type”—which entails carefully setting pieces of lead type into metal trays. It will take hours of painstaking work to compose one page of text for his Letterpress and Bookbinding class.
In his backpack on the ground nearby, there’s a laptop he had hunched over an hour ago, writing code for one of the core classes he must complete to earn his degree in Information Systems. For now, though, the blocks of type demand all of his concentration. A typo could ruin his work.
Months later in 2006, the summer after his senior year, Szczerban emerges from a Manhattan subway. It’s day one of his internship at the publisher Simon & Schuster, where framed book jackets line the halls and editors’ desks are piled with stacks of paper—each a work in progress.
In the fall, he’ll return to CMU as a Fifth Year Scholar, one of just four students selected to more fully explore their interdisciplinary interests. His collegiate studies have been bifurcated between the technical and literary worlds. This has led to a difficult career choice: Should he head to Silicon Valley as a programmer or pursue work as an editor in an industry that is notoriously difficult to penetrate.
By internship’s end, he has ushered books through production, watched editors work with their authors, and seen a few of his own contributions become a reality on bookstore shelves. The literary option is winning.
The following spring, just before he earns dual degrees in Information Systems and Creative Writing, Simon & Schuster asks if he’s interested in helping out for a few weeks. He doesn’t hesitate. “By then, I wanted to be there so bad I would have dressed up like a security guard and stood in front of the door.”
Szczerban gained a full-time spot on the staff shortly after graduating in 2007. Since then, he has assisted on and edited various best sellers as well as acquiring narrative nonfiction, literary fiction, and books about food, culture, science—and information systems.
Last fall, after a series of promotions, he became a full editor, and he has won the 2012 Lawrence Peel Ashmead Editorial Award for promising young editors.
—Michelle Bova (DC’07)
