My last week at Colby-Sawyer College was awesome. I felt a lot more comfortable overall, and I ended up learning many new things about various IT jobs. This second week was a full week, and I logged 43 hours of work during the five weekdays. I did a lot different jobs on many different machines, and overall I had a great time.
On Monday, my first day of work, I got to visit various places on campus and help with a few different tasks. The first stop in the day was at the water quality lab in the science center. They received a new “Spectrophotometer” machine and I needed to help set it up. Once I figured the machine out, the set up was pretty straightforward. David and I also tried to save the department some money by using one of our own cables, but in the end it didn’t work and we used theirs. I also got to work with Art, the network administrator, and helped him put in a new server. I learned how Colby runs and manages their servers, and also how to rack mount the actual hardware. It was fun to work with the new servers and I learned a lot about the psychical hardware that powers these extensive computers.
The next two days were very similar to Monday, in that I got to jump around to various places on campus and do different projects. During all of this though, I still continued to work on creating and imaging faculty desktops. Imaging doesn’t sound like a very exciting job, but you feel accomplished when you see the end result. I ended up creating two working system Images, one for Windows XP and one for Windows 7. These images are copies of the entire system, that’s cloned and placed on various other computers. This ensures every machine has the same settings and software. David, my sponsor, even went as far as using that very Windows 7 image on his own machine and it worked great. I also got to image 7 computers with the XP image I created, these computers are extra faculty machines and they are all set up and ready for when the school year starts.
Day six, seven, eight and nine all went by very fast, and I think it was because I was busy the entire workday. I jumped from place to place and learned about various Colby-Sawyer systems. I got to observe the technological induction of a new staff member, set up an IV pump with a drug library for the head of the Nursing school, hack a .dll file to remove visual aspects of an Operating system, and even breakdown and recycle old Blackboard Card readers. That’s not even everything that I did, this week was really packed full of many jobs. One of the most beneficial moments this week was the hour I spent with Kevin Smith, the Network Administrator.
Networking always interested me, and I got to spend an hour talking and learning about Colby Sawyer’s network. Kevin gave me a tour of their system, and I got to see where the one fiber optic line starts to where it branches off. I learned so many things about networking and it’s hard to remember everything. Kevin showed me the many programs he works with, and talked of what the Network Administrator field is. It was a great experience and I’m glad I got to spend time with him.
This final week at Colby-Sawyer College was crazy and fun. I did so many different things, learned about many jobs and systems, and I enjoyed every bit of it. The IT field is so complex, that even in this two weeklong internship, I still haven’t even scratched the surface. I believe I really benefited from my experience at Colby Sawyer College, and it’s a little sad to not be working again on Monday.
Post time: 3:56pm est
0 comments:
Post a Comment