Alumna Spotlight:
Sydney Mathieu (’16, Publishing)
What’s your favorite memory from your time at Belmont?
The friends I made during my time at Belmont have been real “life people” and that hasn’t stopped. I’ve stayed very close to my best friends to this day.
What are you up to professionally these days?
I produce around 300 audiobooks a year for HarperCollins. I do casting, script development, project management, and set up studios and post-production vendors. We work in little teams at Harper—each team has an Executive Producer (that’s me), a Production Manager and a Managing Editor. I especially love the creative elements of what I do. Casting is a blast. I knew I would like that and scripting, but I was surprised by how much I loved directing as well.
How did you decide to get into publishing and what was your journey there?
After a couple years in Literary PR, someone I worked with at an internship reached out to me about an Audio Coordinator role at HarperCollins. There I did pre-production script prep, made sure manuscripts made sense for audio adaptation and gave notes to the producer. I did that for a couple years and steadily moved up within that role to Project Manager and Senior Project Manager. My music background comes up all the time, especially in my work with sound design—I didn’t realize it, but in some ways I set myself up to be in the audio space.
What’s one thing about Belmont that you hope never changes?
I hope the main quad stays put. It’s so beautiful and nostalgic. Every time I visit, I make sure to take a walk through that space.
