JPL (Integrated Communications, Inc) in Harrisburg, PA.
On Friday
morning September 26th a group of Millersville Students were able to
get a tour of JPL’s facility by the Human Resources Director. Before arriving
at JPL I thought it was a marketing group that helped promote businesses and
provide them with branding and marketing tactics to better their company. JPL
started off as video production company and has moved their company into a more
integrated communications company where they are experienced in all aspects
from video productions, branding, motion graphics, recording, design, event,
publications, marketing, e-learning, interactive design that deals with web
development and so much more. JPL can build a company from the ground up to get
it running. On our tour we were able to talk to most of the departments. This
was nice because we got to see what projects they have completed and were
working on currently.
Starting
off of the tour I thought how interesting this place would be to work at and
how relaxed the environment was. But I wasn’t fond of the layout much. Every
department was split up and everyone was stuck in a cubical. And most of the
cubical were completely empty. This seemed very stand off to me. Personally I
thought if this company was truly integrated that there would be more common
meeting rooms and more people from other departments would be collaborating
with one another. Maybe it was just an off day but the departments seemed very
segregated and no one was communicating.
What really made me upset about this company was the Human Resources
director who didn’t seem very knowledgeable about JPL and what exactly each
department did. Instead of her talking about what department did she tried to
find someone who was available to speak on there own projects. She seemed very
unprofessional to me because her purple lace thong keep on popping out and her
torn jeans were very inappropriate for someone giving a tour of the company to potential
interns and clients. Upon our arrival she knew we were graphic and interactive
design students so she touched base on how to get an internship with JPL and
made it seem impossible which kind of offended most students because she hadn’t
seen any of our work. I was a little annoyed with the Human Resources Director
because she knew that we were all design and interactive students and she
didn’t bring us to talk to any of the graphic designers.
I wish she had
brought us to talk to the actual designers so we got to see exactly what they
were doing. I could have cared less if we got to talk with the e-learning
group. The only part I liked about the tour was when we got to talk with Professor
Nancy Mata’s fellow student who graduated from Millersville University. She was
a graphic designer just like most of us who integrated her way into the
front-end development department where she worked with a lot of the front-end
and back end developers. She showed us one of the projects that she worked on
as a designer and it was set up on this cool station full of all different
laptops, tablets, and phones that have been synced to pull of the same webpage
and show the different layouts and how they would appear on that screen. This appealed to me because most of my
interests are in the front-end development field because you can be a designer
but learn the code that follows with it.
Overall I
took a decent amount of information away because if it weren’t for the human
resources director I would have had a better time. I plan on applying to JPL as
a possible internship but wouldn’t make it my first choice because I know there
are similar companies like JPL.
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