Last month, I looked back at two of the people who mentored me in my early days at Asimov’s. I found the title for the editorial in Henry Adams’s observation that, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” In this editorial, I thought I’d change directions and write about some of the people who have spent time at Asimov’s as college interns.

Anyone who interns at Asimov’s also interns at Analog, our sister magazine. Due to our small staff size, interns get their hands in almost every aspect of magazine production. As a result of their experience with us, our interns may get a greater overview of magazine publishing than they would have at an internship with a much larger publisher. Interns get to do some proofreading, read through piles of unsolicited manuscripts, work on our Readers’ Award poll, help us shepherd the magazine through the various stages of production, and myriad other tasks. They don’t get the final word on submissions or the proofreading, but they do get to read a lot of interesting stories. Of course, they also get exposed to a lot of boring aspects of the job as well.

With any luck, the internship helps young people decide if publishing is the field for them or if it’s actually the last thing they’d ever want to do. We look for people who are deeply interested in SF and/or fantasy. Ideally, they are conversant with modern authors as well as the classics. When we interview an intern, we are always careful to describe the duller aspects of the position along with the fun. Twenty years ago after an interview with Tina Lee—then Analog’s managing editor and a former intern herself—and me, Scott Calvin told a friend, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is I got the job. The bad news is I got the job.” In a recent email, Scott, who is now a physics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, said, “It seemed like the bulk of the interview consisted of being told what a lousy job it was! Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case.”

Some of our interns, like Tina, Paul Stevens, and Shelley Frier, were eventually hired for full-time positions at Asimov’s and Analog. Many moved on to jobs at other publishing houses. Paul is now with Tor Books, Shelley worked at Avon Books for several years before moving to Baltimore, Maryland, and Tina became the director of editorial production at Berlitz Publishing. Josh Starr is an associate editor at DAW Books. Liz Scheier, who worked at Random House and Penguin, is now the director of publishing relations at ScrollMotion, the company that makes the Iceberg e-reader application for the iPhone.

Like Liz and Scott, many of other interns have moved further afield. David Sandner is now assistant professor of Romanticism and Children’s Literature at California State University, Fullerton. Meredith Bennett is in law school. She’s doing an “externship” for the Environmental Protection Bureau of New York’s Attorney General Office, and hopes to go into environmental law once she graduates. Brittany Trogen works in a molecular biology lab during the day. After hours, she moonlights as a director of a “new (and very small) science communication company called Science in Seconds, Ltd. Our main goal is to increase science literacy in the general public.” Brittany has also sold stories to a couple of Canadian speculative fiction magazines.

I’ve lost touch with many of our interns, but every so often one will resurface to update me on his or her career trajectory. Jacob Weisman—the publisher of Tachyon Publications—is the intern I hear from most regularly. Tachyon is a highly regarded small press. It has published award-winning writers like Peter S. Beagle, Michael Moorcock, Nancy Kress, Tim Powers, Cory Doctorow, and Harlan Ellison. Recently, Jacob recounted how his time at our magazine affected him:

Interning at Asimov’s changed my life. Yes, Sheila. All those papers you gave me to file, all those envelopes I had to open, all those story notes I wrote up for the art department, all of it. I know you don’t really believe it, but it did. I met Isaac Asimov exactly once; I enjoyed a memorable lunch with you, Jack Dann, and Lucius Shepard in which some very minor hijinx ensued; and Jim Frenkel [a book editor who dropped by] made fun of the way I dressed. But mostly there was work to be done and I learned that that came first. I was exposed to the work of many fine writers, including Jack McDevitt, Michael Swanwick, and James Patrick Kelly (all of whom I went on to publish years later at Tachyon).

I’d planned at the time to become either a journalist or a freelance fiction writer. While my time at Asimov’s didn’t discourage me from these pursuits, it did show me some of the other avenues open to me, that there were other important jobs to be done and that I could do them. But most of all I got to watch you put out a magazine. The Asimov’s offices were crowded then. Isaac and Gardner Dozois came in on Tuesdays; Tina Lee and I were there every day; Stanley Schmidt and Shelley Frier ran Analog in the next office, barely larger than a cubicle. I saw you wait each evening for the other editors to leave. Your door would shut and the real work, the hard work, would begin.

I can only hope that we did more good than harm for Jacob. Our latest intern is Samantha Chapman, a student at New York University. It’s fun to be working with her now. In a few years, perhaps she’ll stop by to let us know if this internship has had any influence on the path that she chose for herself.