Senior Internship - Week 2 Journal Entry

What is your internship? describe it as if you had an elevator ride to do it in

I am a student help desk technician at Olympic College. I perform low-level IT duties such as password resets, Active Directory management, hardware installation and uninstallation, and software support. A fundamental understanding of technology is required in almost everything I do.

What do you know about it?

I know most of all skills associated with this internship. However, after meeting with my supervisor, we found that there were still skills I am rusty on or have only applied on the job a few times in my two years of working here at Olympic College. We aim to go above and beyond what my role as an IT student technician would suggest and to allow me to use my programming and automation skills to improve on the work processes of the Help Desk. This involves creating 2 different applications, a scheduling app and an application to help reset class account password and email appropriate staff.

What will you need to learn to accomplish it?

I have a basic understanding of Python and have not used VBA before. We have decided that these are the two coding languages I will use to create the applications, and thus, to do so, I will need to learn these languages.

How does it represent your BASIS learning and IT skills?

BASIS has touched on automation throughout several classes and has often focused on the importance of reducing human labor in regard to menial tasks that could otherwise be done automatically. Well, at the help desk, I would admit that there are a lot of tasks I can picture in my head being done with the push of a button. I envision that the worked required for these tasks should be data management rather than hands-on. Why should I manually email 20 people, manually come up with and reset 20 passwords, every 90 days? This work could be done with the push of a button.

I believe that a fundamental skill in information systems is knowing what tasks require a human's hand and which tasks can be delegated to the computer.