The majority of people I work with did an English degree, so having a different and scientific background is a useful thing to bring to the team

I’m currently a Commissioning Editor at Bloomsbury, working on academic books on the Design and Photography lists. This essentially means I look for gaps in the market and see where our readership needs new books, then I find authors to write the books.

It was a bit of a random choice to go into publishing, but it turned out to be a really interesting and challenging area, and there are a lot of things that I find useful having done my psychology degree – quickly summarising and assessing documents, analysing data (sales figures and budgets), developing questionnaires and so on – a lot of which directly builds on what I learnt at Sheffield.

Running the society also gave me the confidence to organise external speakers and arrange presentations by other members of the society, which stood me in good stead for the work I now do with academics and practitioners from around the world

Louise Baird-Smith

BSc Psychology

It’s also interesting as the majority of people I work with did an English degree, so having a different and scientific background is a useful thing to bring to the team.

I was president of the photography society (PhotoSoc) at Sheffield, though the fact I now work on photography books is a bit of a fluke! This did make me stand out in my initial graduate interviews though, and provided something for interviewers to ask about.

Running the society also gave me the confidence to organise external speakers and arrange presentations by other members of the society, which stood me in good stead for the work I now do with academics and practitioners from around the world.