I interviewed Cheryl Gilliam for my Disciplinary Literacy project. Ms. Gilliam is the Senior Packaging Engineer of morning foods at the Kellogg’s Company in Battle Creek, Michigan. I am studying packaging engineering and met Ms. Gilliam early last spring to talk about packaging and thought she would be a good person to interview. Ms. Gilliam attended Michigan State University and received a Bachelors of Science degree in packaging engineering. She originally intended to major in chemical engineering but during her sophomore year she took a packaging elective and changed her major to packaging engineering. The Kellogg’s Company produces breakfast food and they own brands who produce snack foods. Since all Kellogg’s products are food, Ms. Gilliam is in the field of food packaging engineering. There are many different type of packaging professions but food packaging has the highest employment rate and is the largest field for packaging. Ms. Gilliam did not start in food packaging, she actually started in medical and pharmaceutical packaging. She said that she really enjoyed medical packaging, but she fell in love with food packaging and has stayed with it ever since. She also mentioned cosmetic packaging, it is very different from food and medical packaging because of the …show more content…
Gilliam about a normal day for her and she said she spends about 70% of her day in meetings with teams for different projects. 10% of the day is spent mentoring people, another 10% is spent getting ready for the day in the morning to prepare and the rest of her time is other random projects. She works on about a dozen projects at one time with different teams of people, meetings for these teams are conducted either face to face or over the phone. Occasionally there will be video conferencing but never skyping, which is surprising for a company of Kellogg’s size. Video conferences are conducted in a specific room that is set up for the whole room to participate in the