My name is on the cover of a book! What a thrill! Why and how have I gotten so lucky?

In December 2013, I graduated from Utrecht University, with a thesis on transmedia storytelling. Now it was time to get a job. Coming from a family full of teachers, and having enjoyed giving presentations in class, I wondered if I should join the ‘family firm’, as it were, and become a teacher myself. One of the university doctors, Vincent Crone, kindly responded to my request to discuss the options. Unfortunately, he couldn’t offer me much hope for a position at the university at that time. But he did make an alternative suggestion. Had I considered, he asked, teaching at universities of applied science?

After he’d put me on that track, it was only a matter of a few weeks before I found out that Fontys university of applied science offered a Minor programme in transmedia storytelling. My area of expertise! Ah, but there were no vacancies… Still, as you can read elsewhere, the stars aligned and by February 2015, I found myself teaching at Fontys. Result!

When I got settled in, after a few months, I let Vincent know that his advice had helped me find a good job. I was a teacher at a university of applied science! He congratulated me and promptly surprised me with the follow-up. Now that I was teaching at that level, building up experience in grabbing and holding students’ attention… was I perhaps interested in contributing a chapter to a textbook, aimed at that same target group? You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. I couldn’t believe my luck! Vincent had taught various courses for which I had written papers, and he had read my bachelor thesis, so he knew how I wrote. It was flattering that he deemed the quality sufficient for such a project. It took me all of two seconds to accept, and that was that. I was to contribute to a book he was writing with his colleague Rob Leurs, whose lectures I had also attented at university.

With Vincent and Rob at the helm, and with contributions from Marleen Boer, Bas den Herder, Gyurka Jansen, Nico Kussendrager, Laura van der Vlies and me, the textbook was to be a comprehensive introduction to media studies, with a focus on the Dutch media landscape. Over seven chapters, students would be encouraged to think about media from various angles. My chapter is about the content of media (somewhere, Marshall McLuhan is laughing, I’m sure). As it happened, I was invited to contribute a bit more, and so I co-wrote the chapter on media functions with Nico.

It took most of 2015 to write the book – well, from my perspective, anyway. Vincent and Rob must’ve been working on it for a while before I got on board. Media, as the textbook is called, came out on the first of July, 2016. By that time, I was actually, again to my surprise, waist-deep in a very similar project. But more on that later, when that particular book comes out! Over half a year on, now that I’m writing this, it’s still strange and cool to see my name on a textbook, next to the others’ names, published by Noordhoff Uitgevers. (For the international readers: Noordhoff is one of the major educational publishing houses in the Netherlands, a real household name.) How this happened? I suppose I should not be too modest and just say that I write well. But building up a good bond with my teachers, reaching out to them and then keeping them informed on my progress has certainly been a huge factor. It sounds a bit cold to call this networking, as it was never a calculated activity on my part, but I can highly recommend staying in touch with the people you meet and study or work with. You never know when two of them might ask you to contribute to a book!