Putting Myself On Paper

I first create a resume in TSC 210 which is a class at JMU that teaches the basics of technical and scientific communication. One of our assignments was to create a resume and cover letter; although it was the shortest assignment of the class I found it to be the most difficult. I did not feel that I could capture my entire personality and self worth on one sheet of paper.

When I signed up for JMU's Computer Science Internship Office they asked that I bring my resume and cover letter in for inspection. I set up an appointment and met with Dr. Berg. Thirty minutes later I held in my hand a red inked stained resume, it needed to be completely redone. Dr. Berg was nice enough to spend a lot of time with me asking me who I was and what I wanted others to know about me. It took me three visits to realize that a resume is a long and hard process that I will be doing the rest of my professional life. I learned from the JMU Computer Science Internship Office the importance of a resume being the key to getting an interview and after a few weeks of editing and rewriting I was armed with a polished resume.

Locating A Job

The first thing I did to find an internship was to go to James Madison Computer Science Internship Office. After turning in my resume and cover letter I had an interview with the director so he could get a little background information on me and what I was looking for. The next thing I did was ask family friends if they new of any openings where they worked. Companies that I heard about and pursued from friends included Frank Parson's Paper Company, Datatel, XO Communications, NJVC and mindSHIFT Communications. The best way to get your foot in the door is to have a direct connection to someone in the company that can help push your resume and recommend you to the people in charge of hiring.

Another way I looked for jobs was on the Internet and at JMU career fairs. There was a fair about mid-way through the fall semester at the convocation center that got me in touch with a few companies, I talked most with American Management Systems because I have had a few friends work there that enjoyed it. The most important thing I learned about hunting for internships is that you should start as early as possible. A friend at JMU's older sister worked at Datatel and she put in a good word with the HR person and gave her my resume. I got a call back from the HP person the next day telling me that they had already hired their interns for the summer and that I should have applied earlier because my resume was better than most of their hires. So for potential CS interns, my advice to you is the early bird gets the worm.

Interviewing

The companies I interviewed with were CS Corp, Frank Parson's Paper Company, NJVC and mindSHIFT Technologies. CS Corp was just a phone interview but about mid-way through the interview I learned that the location was over an hour away in rush-hour traffic. Frank Parson's Paper Company was my first face to face interview and to put it frankly I was very nervous and shy and the whole interview did not go well. The next place I interviewed with was mindSHIFT Technologies, I knew the guy I was interviewing because I had worked there the summer before part time doing remedial tasks. The day before I interviewed they had gotten a new CEO and Exec VP. I was told that they would have to get a feel for the company for a week or two before they could approve hiring me. The final company I interviewed with was NJVC, I had gained confidence and thought it went really well. I heard about NJVC from my girlfriend's dad who put in a good word for me to a friend of his who also went to JMU about ten years ago. NJVC called me back for a second interview and they ended up offering me a real JR network administration job where I would get trained and become a staff member in a few months if was not going back to school but they were not given the green light to hire an intern. I had to tell them, "Sorry, I want to finish school", but I will reapply for after graduation. mindSHIFT eventually called me back and gave me a job.

Getting the job

I was going to call mindSHIFT and ask them if they were interested in hiring me this summer but I did not think they would because they had three lay offs in the past year. Before I got around to calling them I got an e-mail from Eddie Ankers who I know outside of mindSHIFT and said he wanted to get me hired because they are falling behind in work since their had been so many cut backs. I e-mailed him back and said I am very interested. I talked to his supervisor (Gil Brown) who would actually be hiring me and be my boss a few days later on the phone.

When I got back from school I was called in for a formal interview and a walkthrough what they had in mind for me. The first thing they did when I got there was walk me through the different parts of the company that I would be working with if I was hired. Remaining respectful and professional at all times during the day was a new experience for me and far off from the college life that I am used to. Finally I sat down and had a formal interview and then we went over the tasks that he would want me to do. I carried myself well through this part of the visit but I wish I had asked more questions, I think I was a little bit nervous and trying too hard to please him cause I thought I was in desperation for an internship. I have learned through this experience that it is okay to speak up and ask questions, in a way an interview is part the company learning about you and you learning about the company. My conventional thought on interviews was that it was only a sit down and answer whatever questions they ask and try to sell yourself as best as possible, this summer I learned that there is a lot more involved.

mindSHIFT Technologies

mindSHIFT Technologies is a small computer solution provider. We resell all the computer and networking equipment, software and support that a customer will need to do business so that the customer will not need an IT department of their own. We mainly deal with small companies ranging anywhere from 10 to 200 hundred employees, but most of our customer have less than 50 employees. We make it so that the customer does not worry about computer problems so they can focus on doing business. My office was located in Fairfax, Virginia in an office building right off route 50. Last year mindSHIFT had 110 employees, now they have just over 40 although they have begun hiring again.

The equipment that we resell to our customers in our solution is bought from Cisco, HP and Dell. The software that we buy, sell and support is whatever a customer may asks for and use. Our customers that buy the solution are mainly small companies that do not have the resources to support their own IT department or companies that do not want to deal with the hassles and cost of their own IT department. Due to the size of companies that we deal with most of our customer are law firms, insurance agencies and car dealerships. A lot of our customers have very little computer knowledge which is why they are willing to pay a lot of money for our services.

Departments I Worked In

I worked mainly in two different departments. In the mornings from 7am to about 11am I worked in the Network Operations Center (NOC). This is a room where mindSHIFT can monitor all the servers, circuits and routers that we maintain for our customer's. About five different people work din the NOC varying in time because in case of emergency and failures there is to be someone monitoring the NOC at all times. The other department I worked in was Customer Care, which was in handed all support, customer contact and network administration needed. There are eight people that directly worked in Customer Care. The last department I worked with, but only a small amount of time was the mindSHIFT Implementation Center (MIC). The MIC is in charge of implementing the mindSHIFT solution, setting up and testing the computers and networks before delivery. My boss was Gil Brown and he was director of customer care and the NOC.

Schedule & Pace Of Work

Overall my schedule at work was from 7am to usually 330pm depending on how long of a lunch I take, they were very flexible about when and how long of a lunch I took, as well as if I wanted to leave early one day and stay late another, the only important thing was that I arrived at 7am. The pace of work at mindSHIFT is very hectic and there always seems to be more work than time to do it or more problems then there are people to solve them. The amount of clients for the company continued to increase for the company even though the company was going through serious layoffs. This meant that time was precious, the high up engineers were the most effected and they always had a lot to do. The customer care center was always very busy since they needed to answer phones they generally did not take lunch breaks and our boss would pick up lunch for everyone and bring it back to them and they ate it at their desks. The entire mindset of the company was you always had to be doing something and the employees were happy to work more hours than normal because they wanted their small company to succeed and for them to reap the benefits.

My Roles

I was hired by mindSHIFT to do network administration and to help out with customer care. I ran reports in the NOC, which dealt with making sure our customer servers and circuits where running correctly and backing up properly. Another role I had involves taking care of our customer's network administration, this involves interacting with the customers and account managers to make sure the customers are billed properly. It was my job to watch over the mindSHIFT Customer Care support portal and solve customer problems sent to us via e-mail. The type of e-mails can be anything from circuit issues, to hardware problems to VPN access problems. I also took on many other roles through out my internship, if more man power was ever needed on a project of if someone needed to go out to a customer site to fix a problem I was usually involved. Overall I was given a lot of responsibility and variety of work.

Co-workers

I enjoyed and liked every single person that I worked with at mindSHIFT, I even hung out with a few of them outside of work. On a professional level some of the people there took their job very seriously and did not want to waste their time with questions from other employees. I found some to be difficult to get answers out of and information but they were all really nice and hard working people. There are no other interns at mindSHIFT I am the only intern they have ever had.

Travel

mindSHIFT is a very small company and when things needed to get done I was sometimes sent. Our customers are mainly located in Virginia and Maryland but range up to Texas, California and England. I traveled about once or twice a week, which involved going in my own car usually to D.C. or Maryland (never more than an hour away) to fix a number of different problems that could arise. I found one on one contact with the customers to be very enjoyable because you can see your work paying off by helping set up or fix something that they need or want.

Opportunities to Learn

The best part about doing an internship is getting paid to learn. If I ever had free time at work I would ask to fallow around and engineer and for him/her to explain what they are doing. Just sitting down with someone writing a script or installing and testing new network equipment is an easy and fun way to learn. There is no better way to understand and figure out how things work than hands on experience. There were also a few workshops on how to use certain software packages that I was able to sit in on and learn. These learning experiences combined with the training given by the company add up to education that pays off double time; with a paycheck now and helping get a bigger paycheck after school.

Daily Log

I completed a daily log during each work day. Below is a random week picked from the log, the beginning of each entry is the same because it list my normal duties that I do each day. I was always doing something because there was more work to do than people to do it. Basically I just mentioned a few other things that happened in a day that were interesting, most of what I do is reports, meetings and network administration which are not interesting enough to go into detail; so I wont.

7/22/02 Monday

Run the daily NT and Connected Report, Trouble Shoot all errors found and manually backup servers which did not back up. Inform and discuss all problems with servers in meeting.

 Do all necessary network administration for the customers

Go through the support e-mails

• Make cases in clarify for all urgent requests and problems
• Solve cases that I can

Today was a normal day in the beginning. When my eight hours were up I was told I needed to run to D.C. for a customer who is a CEO and needs a laptop with his old files on it instantly. His My Documents folder was three GBs alone. So we did not have time to get his last image from the backup tapes. So we just put a plane image with nothing on it but the basic apps. I then went to the site and mapped the drive of the old laptop into the new one and transferred the files manually. I also transferred his cookies and favorites so that his new machine will run the same as the old machine. By the time I got home it had been a long day.

7/23/02 Tuesday

Run the daily NT and Connected Report, Trouble Shoot all errors found and manually backup servers which did not back up. Inform and discuss all problems with servers in meeting.

 Do all necessary network administration for the customers

Go through the support e-mails

• Make cases in clarify for all urgent requests and problems
• Solve cases that I can

Today we had a meeting about the reorganization of the company and its future. The 6 month goals were defined and discussed. A lot of finance stuff. Most interesting and informative meeting I have attended because I learned a lot about the money involved in even a small business such as this one. I was also shocked about the amount of money we are loosing each month and I cannot believe that we are still in business. One of the reasons I think we are still up and running is because we are under contract for 3 years with all of our customers.

7/24/02 Wednesday

Run the daily NT and Connected Report, Trouble Shoot all errors found and manually backup servers which did not back up. Inform and discuss all problems with servers in meeting. (7-9)

 Do all necessary network administration for the customers

Go through the support e-mails.

• Make cases in clarify for all urgent requests and problems
• Solve cases that I can

Today we had a case where someone had locked out there computer one of the support guys called Dell and they said that you need to take out the CMOS battery wait two minutes and then run a Windows repair. All the site engineers where being used so I was sent out to Bethesda Maryland to fix the customer computer. This after traffic took up the rest of my day.

7/25/02 Thursday

Run the daily NT and Connected Report, Trouble Shoot all errors found and manually backup servers which did not back up. Inform and discuss all problems with servers in meeting. (7-9)

 Do all necessary network administration for the customers

Go through the support e-mails.

• Make cases in clarify for all urgent requests and problems
• Solve cases that I can

Today I got caught in a really annoying meeting about how our mail relay works that was so basic that the others and I already knew everything that was explained to us. It was a complete waste of time and drove us nuts

A UPS went down on one of our customer's servers. I called Dell to get the replacement there. We have four-hour support, meaning Dell has to be there in four hours or less to fix any problem with a server. They were out of stock so are mailing the customer one over night. Dell has failed in their four-hour mark a lot recently so I was instructed by my boss to raise hell with the Dell people. This took a considerable amount of time waiting for the head support guys at Dell to get free so I could complain.

7/26 Friday

Run the daily NT and Connected Report, Trouble Shoot all errors found and manually backup servers which did not back up. Inform and discuss all problems with servers in meeting. (7-9)

 Do all necessary network administration for the customers

Go through the support e-mails.

• Make cases in clarify for all urgent requests and problems
• Solve cases that I can

Today I went to a customer site because someone had upgraded from a laptop to an executive laptop which are smaller and faster. It was already set up except that I loaded TrendMicro on the system. However when I was there I was confronted with a list of employee's who needed my help. Two of them had just switched over to cable modem at home and wanted to know how to get on the VPN from home using their new cable line, I set it up for them and put a icon on there desktop to make it easy. Another customer had a LaserJet he wanted to use on his computer and didn't have a driver for it. And Finally someone was granted access to a group mailbox and wanted to get it to their Outlook. This seemingly sort and easy trip ended up taking a long time.

Skills Used

mindSHIFT expected that I have general networking and IT skills before starting. They expected that I be very familiar with Windows 2000 Server and general network administration. I learned a lot of these skills taking CS classes at JMU. The most helpful of all the class was CS460 which is a networking class that teaches how to setup a network using Windows 2000 machines and Linux machines. The program classes like CS240 come in handy a when helping to create or design scripts and programs. All of the classes I have taken for CS helped me with my job because I dealt with a wide variety of tasks at my internship. TSC210 was another very helpful class because it teaches you how to write professionally which is very important. I was surprised at the amount of communication that I did not only internal but also to customers and I had no previous experience with business writing before TSC 210. Beyond JMU there are many different ways to improve your abilities and make your internship more successful. In networking a lot of the stuff you need to learn is aided by hands on experience. Tinkering with networks and computers on your free time for fun is an excellent way to make finding a job and keeping a job a lot easier. Most of the employees at mindSHIFT are network certified, either Microsoft or Cisco but many of them are both. Getting certified in anything makes your resume look much better and will help you get a job that you want.

Overall Evaluation

I have learned more about computers and business in my three months at mindSHIFT than any one of my college courses so far. I was very nervous when I started at mindSHIFT because I was worried I might not be technically able or not enjoy working with networks and the IT world. This internship has given me the confidence in myself and my chosen major and field, now I am excited to get into the working world after I graduate. I have made friends, while enjoying and learning a lot more than excepted and the whole time I was making money and earning credit. mindSHIFT even offered me to come work for them over Christmas break and offered me a job when I got out of college. It might have been difficult waking up every morning and acting professional but the benefits are worth it. If you are thinking about taking an internship I completely recommend it.