Section 2 - About the Job

Employer:	EREN Corporation - http://www.erencorp.com
Location:	Harrisonburg, VA
Business Hours:	Monday Through Friday 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Department:	Computer Services
Number of Employees:	12 Full Time Employees
Role of the CS People:	The Computer Science personnel are responsible for maintaining the company network and computers as well as billing hours to computer related contracts that are currently being worked on. Contracts for the CS personnel mostly consists of specialized software packages, networking services (i.e. Backup/Recovery Plans and Network Installations/Configuration), and System Life Cycle validation.
Customers:	Generally most of the customers for the EREN Corporation are manufacturing or packaging plants, however there have been some other clients from other areas. The main focus of the Computer Services department has been specialized software packages for the Merck & Co, Inc plant in Elkton, VA with some automation support for the production portion of that facility. Some other customers have been: Wrangler, Coors, and other local businesses.
Supervisor:	Aaron J. Shirkey - Computer Services Engineer
Pace of Work:	The Pace of work at the EREN Corporation is generally busy. There are regular marketing meetings, project meetings, and individual deliverables for each project. With an even balance of group meetings and individual work the EREN Corporation is a very busy and productive company that provides a diverse range of services. I typically did not run out of work.

My Job over the summer consisted of two main parts: first was to provide automation support for a manufacturing plant, and second was to assess legacy and enduring automation systems for FDA compliance. Both were very challenging and both provided me with unique perspective into the manufacturing industry.

The automation support part of my internship was extremely interesting to me coming from a computer science (CS) background. Programmable controllers and operator interface terminals are just not things that computer science majors are faced with while in school. However, I was surprised to find out that the mechanisms and development cycles used in automation are the exact same or very similar to those used in general software development. This was a big advantage for me coming into this internship. I was able to jump right into my work and without much assistance I was able to complete my assigned projects efficiently.

Automation support for me included many aspects of the automation process. Ranging from documenting procedures, all the way to implementing and testing code on some systems. However the majority of my time was spent researching and developing backup/recovery plans for legacy systems that ran on DOS and Windows 3.1. Most of these system were several years old and had special configurations for their operating systems, so I was not able to just perform application backups. At some points this research became very difficult because I was limited by hardware and software incompatibility issues. However, in the end my supervisor and I found two easy and relatively quick methods for backing up the majority of these systems. The first method involved an IOMEGA Zip drive and the guest drivers provided with that unit, and the second used a Plextor SCSI CD Burner and a software package called CDRESQ, that runs from a disk. This made our backup tools portable and they did not require us to install new software on the PCs.

The assessment portion of my internship was also a valuable learning experience. Through these assessments I was able to learn the steps and requirements for installing, maintaining and validating a production system within the pharmaceutical industry. There are a large amount of regulations placed on production based systems that I had no knowledge of prior to this internship. The main thing that I learned from these assessments was that documentation is the key to successful system development. There are reasons why the FDA, and other regulatory agencies require documented validation of production systems, and that is because it ensures good development practices. This was the most apparent correlation that I was able to make back to one of my classes at JMU. In CS 345 - Software Engineering we discussed many development plans for software, but all of the plans included some level of documentation and testing.

The main things that I learned during this job were to document everything I do, and that there are a lot of diverse career paths for computer scientists to choose from. I believe these to be two very important aspects of the computer science atmosphere and I look forward to starting my career after this experience.