unpaid internship – At 31, a publishing associate says she quit her full-time job after a persistent sense something was wrong—only to learn her former company was closing soon after. With the job market feeling frozen and “ghost jobs” rising, she took an unpaid book-publishing i
In April 2025, she was working as a full-time publishing associate—comfortable, even content—when a foreboding feeling wouldn’t leave her.
One moment, she was dealing with Netflix celebrities. The next, she says her instincts were screaming that something was wrong. She couldn’t explain it, but the feeling haunted her until she did something she describes as reckless.
She quit.
She filed her resignation, and by the morning after, she says the doubt was gone—leaving her “shell-shocked,” staring at what she had just done. “Did I really just do that?” she wrote.
Then the headline came soon after: her former company was closing.
The timing didn’t feel like validation. It felt catastrophic. She had been right about her instincts, but being right didn’t make losing her job hurt less.
In a highly competitive industry, she joined the ranks of job seekers. She says she quickly learned people were applying to hundreds of roles without hearing back—describing a job market that felt frozen, with ghost jobs on the rise. The traditional hiring framework, she says, was no longer working.
So she switched routes—choosing what she calls “the road less traveled.”
She turned to the “internships” button on a job board and applied to an unpaid internship in the book-publishing sector. To her surprise, she got an answer. After an assignment and two interviews, she says the director of a literary agency asked her searchingly, “Do you really want to be here?”
She says she did. Not because she thought becoming an intern was glamorous, but because she longed to return to a space where a community invested in collective success.
At 31, she became an intern.
The financial reality was immediate. She had to rely on freelance gigs and seasonal jobs to make ends meet.
And there was another kind of pressure too: age. She described the age gap cutting in during moments at the table—when she sat with people 11 years younger. Still, she says she was in awe of them. They were emotionally open, asked questions without embarrassment, and talked honestly about stress, uncertainty, and hopes.
Listening to them at the agency. she says she realized how guarded she had become as an adult moving through corporate environments. She wanted the energy they brought. But time was the limiter. She didn’t have time to be freely curious—no room for extra inquiry or mentorship. And when the internship ended, she couldn’t simply go back to class like her intern cohorts.
She needed a real job. The fear, she writes, was that she had “gone backwards.”
Then came the next obstacle in her job search: auto-rejections and AI bots. She worried that HR would “choke” on the “intern” stamp, especially because she wasn’t looking for roles she described as entry-level—she was seeking roles commensurate with her experience.
She says the turning point came from what her younger fellow interns had taught her. She became more open, stopped expecting judgment, transformed curiosity into fearlessness, and began job-seeking beyond conventional avenues.
She did it through conversations—specifically, through outreach.
She used her intern status to lead outreach and contacted 145 people working in roles she aspired to. Over approximately two months, she completed 80+ networking calls.
In her telling, the dynamic flipped. Instead of being interviewed, she says she found herself interviewing the people she contacted. She describes them as genuinely interested in her background, her unusual career path, and her confident networking.
By the last stretch of the internship in 2026, she says she received multiple job offers. The detail she calls the “wildest part” is that she never applied to any of them.
She says people wanted to hire her because of her unique experience and demonstrated drive.
She accepted a role as a literary agent with a nurturing, high-performing team—ending with what she calls a “happy new beginning.”
Jackie Garcia-Morales is an author, publicist, and literary agent based in New Jersey. Connect on Linkedin.
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