This week, we are saying goodbye to our wonderful Marketing Assistant, Olivia Schmitz. Olivia has been with us since 2021 and has made her mark, taking on design work for book & journal covers, formatting catalogs, and even creating this very blog. While we are sad to see her go, we are very excited to see what she has in store for her next adventure! Before she starts her new journey, we asked her a few questions about her time working at the Press.
Which is your favorite blog post that you did?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the staff bookshelves are always my favorite thing to do for the blog. I love not only seeing what my coworkers are reading but what they have to say about what they’re reading, why they chose it, etc. There’s always enough overlap that I feel like you could map out our interests from one book to another, but when you look at the books on each end of that line, our interests stretch such a wide gambit of genres and topics. It’s fascinating! Plus it never leaves me without recommendations to add to my TBR list.
In terms of a specific post, though, my favorite has got to be the collection of parody covers I made for the anniversary of the Press’s founding/University Press Week in 2022. I’d been working on those for a while, so to finally get to show them off and see people enjoy them made me really happy.
What is a particularly fond and/or bizarre memory you have from working at the press?
In concept and execution, the Journal Reveal Party was definitely one of the most odd things I did in my time here. As an incredibly unambitious baker, making and bringing in a multi-colored tiered cake was totally uncalled for, frustrating, and very fun. In terms of the truly bizarre, though, I have to say it was the first time I was taken down to Caldwell Hall’s basement, and we passed the toilet graveyard. A hundred porcelain thrones and sinks sitting in a cold, dark room underground with little to no explanation. Then, a few weeks ago, I and some other employees went on an expedition to the basement, decided to try and find it again, and failed. Now it feels almost like a dream, and I’ll never be 100% certain that it actually ever existed. If it did exist, was it indeed a graveyard, or rather an orphanage of toilets awaiting to be taken to their real home? The mystery will haunt me forever. This is how myths are born.
If you could give one piece of advice to your past self who just got hired to CUAP, what would it be?
From day 1, start keeping a record of the funniest things, written and spoken, that are exchanged between the members of the Press. There were so many lines were hilarious in and out of context that are lost to the ages, and I deeply regret not being a better historian in that regard.