| digiCOM Grads Reconnect Working at Pipeline Interactive |
11.28.12 |
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Andrew Berger ’11 (right) and Sean Deffley ’11 (left) readily credit their time at Lebanon Valley College and the relationships built while they were students for bringing them to their current positions working for Pipeline Interactive in Lebanon.
“Pipeline is a web development solution,” Berger said. “We work on websites and do some marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. We also have some clients who come to us for print materials. We do the design work for them and then send the jobs outside for printing.”
Pipeline is a small firm with 15 employees, so the daily demands in the office are high. They take on new customers often but spend much of their day-to-day operation working with recurring customers looking to tweak sites the firm has built in the past. “There are times when clients kind of beat you down, but you just have to take it and stay calm and relaxed,” Berger said. “You have to tell them how things are and be nice to them.”
Berger and Deffley both majored in digital communications at LVC and shared a number of classes together despite working in different concentrations. Berger, who enrolled as a digiCOM major but did not know what he wanted to do after college, studied business. Deffley studied print design.
At Pipeline, Berger works as a project coordinator – a position he describes as a trainee role for someone who will eventually become a project manager. “I knew I wanted to work with computers, so digital communications was perfect for me. At LVC, I was focused more on the business cognate, which is what I think led me to the project management side of things.”
In his role, Berger works on scheduling, budgeting, and communicating with clients so that jobs are completed on time and under budget whenever possible. He assigns tasks to web designers and developers throughout the week and works to assure quality by gauging the clients’ specs against the actual materials being produced.
Web designers create the visuals associated with a website. Developers do all of the backend coding to create content management systems. In between those two roles is Deffley, who works as a front end web developer. He takes the designs and converts them to code so that developers can make the concepts functional.
“Digital communications at a liberal arts type of school is great because it gives you a full-rounded education in a lot of different technology fields,” Deffley said. “I went into graphic design, but now I’m in web design and development. I was prepared for either field.”
Deffley gained experience as a student building the Wig and Buckle website from coding that he knew at that time. After taking the Advanced Website Design course – a practical course that both men say helped ready them for the real world – he was able to redesign the site to its current model.
Berger began interning with Pipeline as a senior and was hired upon graduation. He was later able to recommend Deffley.
“We don’t work directly with each other that much,” Deffley said. “I report to Andrew on some projects. Still, it was really nice going in for that interview. He led me upstairs and gave me a talk on what he really liked about the company. We had so many classes together, but it was great having someone there that was able to level with me.”
The connections extended, too, when Deffley realized that the Dennis A. Miller, president of the company, is also an alumnus of the College. “It’s a small company, so you get to know everybody eventually,” Deffley said. “It did give me some things to talk about during my interview.”
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