Week 9:

We got the assignment change this week! I'm now hopping from team to team in TAC, getting training, shadowing support calls, getting engineers to teach me about their respective technologies, and trying not to be a nuisance everywhere I go. Tues/Wed we received some formalish training from Shyam and Rajeshwari of the Architecture team. As the training went on I discovered that BYU does a pretty good job of preparing us with knowledge that can be universally applied. Classes in IT and CS made it a lot easier to pick everything up, especially concepts of process scheduling and memory management in Operating Systems by Professor Teng and the concepts taught in Networking by Prof. Ekstrom. The modern IT workplace really is a hydra of technologies, most of which we get some exposure to at BYU. Occasionally I wonder, as I'm sure every student does, if my college education has been worth the time and money spent. Attempting to approach this internship sans formal education would have been incredibly difficult. As it is I feel that I've been exceptionally prepared, and I still have another year of classwork!

This week we'll be joining the LAN/WAN guys across the floor. I've been able to spend a little time with them before and some of the projects they work on are huge in scale: WAN links spanning over a dozen devices and multiple ISPs. It'll be fun to see what problems companies of this size run into, and how the issues are resolved.