October 15th, 2015, by Traci Turner

Casey Jabbour, a 2013 Media Arts and Technology graduate, had always dreamed of working for Conde Nast, a magazine publishing and media company.

The first time Jabbour laid eyes on the tablet version of Wired magazine in the Magazine Publishing class, she knew she wanted to work in the digital publishing industry. After that class, she began researching Conde Nast, Wired magazine’s publisher. Two things that stood out to her were the magazine publisher’s diverse portfolio and the interactive components of their magazines’ tablet versions. She put the company at the top of her future job list.

After Jabbour graduated and completed her co-op with Cunard cruise line, she started working for Conde Nast in February 2014. She worked at the corporate level for a year and decided she wanted to transfer to one of their magazines. At the time, GQ was hiring and she started the internal hiring process. The process consisted of submitting her resume to human resources and going to three interviews.

After having interviews with GQ’s production manager, managing editor and editor-in-chief, she was given the job. She has been working at GQ as their Digital Production Associate for about six months now.

Jabbour’s main duty is to take the layout that has been designed for print and reflow it into a design for tablet. She works with graphic designers and writers to get the text to fit in the tablet layout.

Her favorite part about her job is working in InDesign everyday and getting to interact with every department at GQ. “It is a dream that I am working at a company like this right out of college,” said Jabbour, “I have the job I always wanted.”

At her job, she applies skills she learned in magazine design class and print production classes. “During the hiring process, the company actually made a comment that they had never seen so much print production background just from college classes,” said Jabbour, “All of the print production classes I took made my resume stand out from other people.”

Without her technical background and extracurricular work that allowed her to develop design skills, she would have been like any other applicant. Her advice for students is to work extra hard on class projects and take a couple graphic design classes if given the opportunity. She believes networking is important as well. “I know everyone gets so sick of hearing this in college but you really have to network,” said Jabbour, “The only reason I ended up getting a job with Conde Nast was because I knew a recent graduate that worked there. Once you get the interview, you need the work to back it up and a solid set of skills too.”