The EMC Experience

Being an employee at the EMC has really been an amazing experience. I know that personally I have grown as a person and gained many skills that will help me in my future career. My colleagues and I decided to do a little investigating into how everyone else who worked here felt about their jobs and their experiences of being a part of the EMC, to see if they feel the same way that I do.

The Emergent Media Center has a unique working environment, where teams assigned to very different types of projects all meet in one space to accomplish their goals.

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Our employees had similar takeaways from their time here. Experience was a major one, as working at the EMC has helped employees gain valuable skills and knowledge in different fields. It’s incredible how diverse the experiences people have had here are; there’s everything from building things in the MakerLab, to marketing in the EMC, to creating videos for clients, to creating virtual reality programs and games for social causes. There is so much variety and creativity happening here that it is hard to explain it all in one post.

Students have learned that communication and having a diverse skill set is invaluable to a team, as we all pool together our different backgrounds to make some truly amazing projects come to life.

After getting a little background on students takeaways, we decided to see where everyone thought that the most inspiration happened, besides at the teams that they worked at of course. It’s cool to see how they view the other divisions that make up the EMC. Half of respondents chose the Sandbox Team because they have the creative freedom to work on fun and unique projects and they can make use of their unique skills in a team setting. One quarter of respondents chose the MakerLab because of a love of tinkering and the availability of a diverse set of tools to play around with. The rest chose the Make a Change game because it is battling a cause that they feel strongly about and because it focuses on a more typical game development environment.

It’s crazy how different the projects are from team to team, yet we all work in this same creative space. We had several workshops in the MakerLab throughout this semester, and we thought it’d be interesting to see which one our employees most wished they had been around to participate in. The majority of respondents chose the animated LED cube, which I can’t blame them because it looks really cool when lit up. The second most popular option was the laser cutting/wood block printing workshop, and the rest of the respondents chose the custom gas can guitar workshop. Personally I would also go with the guitar one, I’d love to have created my own workable guitar from just a gas can1545040_10153387615843334_7174255393472200280_n and jam out.

Our final question was funny, where we asked our employees how they would get Jen Adrian, Sr. Creative Communication Manager at the EMC back for her April Fool’s prank. Jen put Chauncy stickers on the bottoms of all the EMC computer mice and power buttons so they didn’t work properly, and she managed to capture some video of us struggling to see what the problem was. One employee said that he would unscrew the wheels from her chair, and another responded that she would give her oreos that had toothpaste in them instead of cream. I went with the classic option of having a stuffed beaver (a.k.a Chauncy) keep on appearing near her with everyone pretending they didn’t know how it got there, hopefully spooking her out a little. All of the responses were in good fun, as I doubt any of us could win against Jen in a pranking war.
It has been an incredible journey for me, and it seems like everyone else truly feels the same way. I feel honored to have worked with so many amazing people during this semester. The experiences that we have gained here will be in our memories and in our hearts for a lifetime.