Emerson-Penguin Random House Mentor Program Provides Students With Critical Skills, Careers in High-Growth Publishing Industry

Emerson’s Penguin Random House (PRH) Mentorship Program opened the doorway to career success for Liz Gomez ’25.

“During the mentorship I worked on six novels and it was amazing,” said Gomez, who participated in the program during the 2024-25 academic year. “I had so much fun working on them and I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, which is a great thing to learn at 21.”

At the conclusion of the program she was hired as a paid intern, which in turn led to Gomez’ current position as a freelance copy editor for the publishing giant. 

Gomez, who graduates from Emerson this month, isn’t the only such student success story. The partnership between Emerson and Penguin Random House has become a true pipeline for Emersonians who want to work in publishing. Since the partnership began four years ago, 51 Emerson students have participated in the program, with nearly half ultimately being hired into PRH’s freelance pool. Additionally, three program alumni, including Eva Windler ’24, have since been hired full time.

“The experience was really cool,” Windler said. “[It] got me a lot of connections, and helped me get a full-time job at Penguin.” 

“In the beginning, I’d get feedback from my mentor that I was making unneeded edits. They’d tell me that I didn’t need to flag that, or they’d tell me that I made a good catch on an edit that no one else made,” said Windler. Such feedback gives students a better sense of how, for example, editing is different than proofreading.

Today, Windler is an associate ebook production manager at PRH itself and also freelances for Knopf, a division of PRH. She credits the mentorship program’s structure—especially being matched one-on-one with an editor—with helping her learn the skills she needed to step into publishing’s technical environment, where both editorial and software skills are a must.

She added that her Emerson coursework and extracurricular activities—including working as a digital producer for the Undergrad Students for Publishing student org and copyediting for the student-run Stork Magazine—also expanded her editing and technical skills.

A Highly Competitive Program

To be selected for the Penguin Random House mentorship program, students must undergo a rigorous PRH-administered copyediting and proofreading test. The competition is steep and the acceptance rate is low, only 8.5% of students who applied this year were accepted: eight Emerson students from the Creative Writing and Publishing and Writing programs (one undergrad and seven graduate students) made the cut.

PRH mentors note that due to the ever-increasing volume of books, they require a growing and diverse pool of freelancers. This might surprise some given today’s screen-centric world. But while publishing has changed over recent decades, one thing has not: a healthy demand for books of all kinds, in more categories than ever before. This industry growth is one reason that during its four-year lifetime to date, the mentorship program has become a meaningful pipeline for skills-development and early-career editorial talent.  

Writing, Literature & Publishing Associate Professor Susanne Althoff has served as the faculty advisor to the PRH mentorship program since its inception in 2021. She said the six-month remote training program is incredible because it provides students with direct involvement and insight into the publishing industry’s editorial process with one of the five largest book publishers in the world.

Participants of the program are paired with a PRH production editorial mentor, and they work on soon-to-be published manuscripts. Students are paid an hourly rate and work on all genres, learning core skills including copyediting, proofreading, slugging, and cold reading. They are taught how to balance clarity, grammar, authorial voice, and respectful editorial communication—a critical skill emphasized throughout Emerson’s copyediting classes.

“They’re working on real books that are released to the public in a matter of weeks and months. It’s not test manuscripts. They’re working on things about to go out the door,” said Althoff. “Students walk away with a deep knowledge of the publishing industry, and actually work in the field while they’re still in college.”