My summer spent working here at ITS has been a terrific learning experience and extremely rewarding. ITS has a unique corporate culture, a culture where individuals are encouraged to seek out problems and propose solutions to them. Individuals here are pushed to give their all and work collaboratively with their coworkers to further the mission of the University. This creates an environment where people come to work excited to work on interesting and complex problems. It was a pleasure to work in such a place this summer.
The internship program itself excels at introducing interns to ITS, in addition to providing a number of opportunities for professional development. The professional development opportunities arise from three major parts of the program, the Friday afternoon retreats, the Intern Cohort Projects, and the meetings with a mentor.
Friday afternoon retreats generally feature 2 main components: an executive roundtable, and a learner’s series. The executive roundtable allows interns to learn from and about the senior leadership of ITS, such as their day to day responsibilities, their career journey, and how they define success. All the executives that visited with the program were inspiring, with their passion for improving higher education, and their drive to excel as individuals. The learner’s series serves to introduce interns to relevant topics they are likely to encounter in the workplace, and connect interns with individuals who may be useful in completing their cohort projects. Topics this year ranged from responsive web design to big data and project management. I personally found a number of the topics really interesting, and it was nice to have a formal introduction to the them.
In addition to work for their assigned department, interns are expected to work on an Intern Cohort Project. This is a project which a group of interns pitch to the internship committee, and will either be approved or asked to join a different project. Then, for the rest of the internship, the group will manage the project themselves, with minimal oversight from any regular employees. The projects are intended to have the interns improve ITS or the University in any way they see fit. For example, my group has created a solution for easily transferring graduating student’s files out of AFS and into the student’s possession, either it be to their local computer or to a cloud service like Box or Google Drive. Sadly, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to finish the cloud service section before we leave at the end of the summer. That being said, it’s been an amazing experience working on the project. I’ve been able to take an active part in managing a project that will contribute to the University, and gained a lot of experience in communicating with others in the workplace. I’ve also come to realize that the hardest part of the technical project is not the technology itself, but the coordination, planning, and promotion of the product itself.
The Internship Program has a lot of built-in support for interns. We have regularly scheduled meetings with our supervisor, coach, and mentor. The supervisor and coach meetings focus primarily on progress made on workplace tasks, while the mentoring sessions focus more on personal and professional goals and habits. Mentor sessions can be scheduled whenever and wherever is convenient for both the mentor and mentee. Mentors and mentees are not paired at random. Each intern is given a chance to speak to all the possible mentors and make a list of their most preferred. This way each intern is given the best chance to be able to make the most of the mentoring sessions. These sessions can be about anything, but my sessions generally focused on things to be aware of when working, and while looking for a job.
Spending the summer here at ITS was a truly rewarding experience, and it has allowed me to progress as a professional. I feel much more prepared and focused heading back to school this year, and I’m excited to take the skills I’ve learned here and use them in future endeavors.
Mike McGookey, Database Administration.