TricorBraun Selects Junior Packaging Intern, Zack Petricca

Also IDSA, UIUC Student Chapter President 2016-2017

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Aug 24, 2016, 10:24 ET

OAK BROOK, Ill., Aug. 24, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- TricorBraun Design & Engineering Group reaps the rewards of a mutually beneficial experience with intern Zack Petricca from Lincolnshire on board. Petricca was brought on for a ten week period to assist the package design team, managed by Samantha Juna as well as the engineering and technical services team working one-on-one with Gregg Aukeman, Package Quality Engineer. At the end of this period, he will showcase a design project to the entire team. He will be a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) this year with plans to complete his B.F.A. in Industrial Design.

According to Becky Donner, Senior Vice President, Design & Engineering, "We believe that investing in our future is defined by giving back to our community and providing opportunities for students to gain real-world experience as well as an understanding of the skills that are necessary to perform the work that we do. In turn, we gain a fresh perspective and our ideas are challenged in a way that is outside of the status quo."

The team at TricorBraun first met Petricca at the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) UIUC Job Fair organized by the student chapter during portfolio reviews and interviewing sessions two years ago. Petricca explains that at the conference, "I received valuable advice on how to present my work and how to communicate why I made the decisions I did during an interview." Petricca was recently elected president to the student chapter at UIUC by the IDSA for the 2016-2017 school year. Last fall, he studied abroad at the National University of Singapore and then served as the secretary for the IDSA UIUC student chapter during the spring semester.

TricorBraun has participated in the IDSA event for the past three years and typically works with about 15 students each time. TricorBraun is one of approximately 40 organizations that participate. Donner describes Petricca, "Zack stood out. He's uber creative, flexible, motivated and eager to learn. Several of our current employees attended the University of Illinois so we have a great deal of faith in their program and we have supported education there for many years by being actively involved in sponsoring projects, coaching and teaching students on-site and also through our participation at the IDSA UIUC Job Fair."

Juna involved Petricca in various stages of the development process, giving him the opportunity to participate in research, brainstorming and other activities such as sketching and model preparations. Leveraging TricorBraun's existing primary consumer research for handleware, Petricca was also asked to design a family line of automotive packages including a 1-gallon handleware, a trigger sprayer and a concentrate. He learned to translate concept sketches into SolidWorks models to produce a final rendering presentation. According to Juna, "It's so beneficial to us to have to break down what we do every day, without a second thought, to someone new because it helps us see the process in a new light and stimulates new thinking."

On the quality assurance side, Petricca contributed to performance/comparative testing, confirming performance and leak testing, confirming the non-compatibility of a proposed closure, troubleshooting over caps that were breaking, performing dimensional/performance analysis and providing general lab support for mold qualifications and other performance testing.

According to Petricca the best part of this experience is that, "Working with both the design and quality teams at TricorBraun, I am gaining the insight I want to see how a design reaches commercialization and why validation is so important to the process." He goes on to say, "I would definitely recommend this real-world experience to others because it gave me a chance to see how something is actually made."

Petricca has been on a fast path to building his resume as the PR and Alumni Chair for Theta Chi Fraternity, Media Coordinator and Treasurer for the Life Drawing Club, member of Phi Eta Sigma Honor Society and National Society of Collegiate Scholars.

Donner explains, "We plan to stay the course by working with interns, participating in the IDSA Midwest Conference and working with UIUC because for us, it is mission critical to support the educational community and to continue to open doors not only for students but for the benefit of refreshing our own perspective and thinking."

TricorBraun Design & Engineering Group is a business unit of TricorBraun, one of North America's leading providers of rigid, corrugated and flexible packaging. Our team's primary mission is to design, engineer and manage the development, production and commercialization of custom packaging solutions for personal care, cosmetics, healthcare, food and beverage, industrial household chemical and animal health products. It is supported by TricorBraun's more than 40 offices globally, holding one of the largest inventories of rigid packaging components worldwide. For more information about TricorBraun Design & Engineering Group, contact Charmaine Laine, Marketing Communications Manager, at [email protected] or 630-645-1208.

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SOURCE TricorBraun