University of Pittsburgh Department of Computer Science
Experiences during Three Co-Op Rotations with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation
The co-op program sparked my interest for a variety of reasons. With the recent influx of Computer related students, the chance to have some real-world experience was definitely a hook. Also, all of the jobs paid significantly better than even related employment or internships that I could get. The biggest attraction was to be able to get experience that was outside the realm of our curriculum here. While I do have an interest in programming, I really do not want to be a programmer, my interests lie more in network and database administration. Since such things are not really covered in as much depth as I would have liked, I began the search for a job that could supply me with some experience, and more importantly, a job where I could learn a lot. After interviewing with several companies, I was offered jobs from Cincinnati Bell, Pittsburgh Direct Technology, and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. I did not really feel like re-locating, and the job with Pittsburgh Direct Technology would not have afforded me as much freedom as I would have liked, so I chose to work for PENNDOT. My best advice on the interview process is to just be honest, and be yourself. The employers that you will be interviewing with know that you are a college student, and that you will not have much experience. If they do not realize this, you probably don't want to work for hem anyway. It is not necessary to try and impress them by rattling off the names of systems or languages that you don't know how to use. Rather, you should try to impress them with your enthusiasm, professionalism, and willingness to learn.
My PENNDOT career began with a rousing day-long introduction to general department policies and procedures. The next day, I was introduced to the Information Technology Manager who would be my boss. Our department was in charge of all of the Information Technology related needs of District 11, an area that included the District Office, all of the tunnels in Pittsburgh, 3 county offices, and a variant number of construction trailers. Items we were responsible for included hardware support and repairs, help-desk software support, cellular phones, Installation and administration of a token ring LAN and WAN as well as a corporate Intranet, the District 11 Web Page, as well as doing some graphics work, multimedia programming, and some Databases.
At the time I arrived, the building was being wired for the new network that was to be installed, so most of my first month there was spent preparing for this migration. This included figuring out solutions for phasing out the old Mainframe systems in favor of our new servers. Also, we had to upgrade both the hardware and the software of a larger number of users. It was during these upgrades that I learned the importance of training the users on their new systems *before* the upgrades take place. It was a lesson that I would put to use in upgrades in my later terms. The second month was spent actually setting up our servers, and changing the wiring for all of the machines. We also struggled with a variety of issues relating to stability of the new servers, which seemed to have a propensity to crash on a weekly basis. All in all, this was a very valuable part of my time at PENNDOT.
The third month of my first rotation was spent helping to prepare our annual Four-Year Business plan. It has be done on an overhead projector up to that point, and our department helped them convert to PowerPoint format. We added such things as live streaming video into the presentation, which was very well received, and served as a precursor to future projects.
At the beginning of my second rotation, I was able to almost immediately build on my networking experience from the fall. We streamlined our networks for security and performance by setting up an individual, private network at each separate office, then connected them via Virtual Private Networking, enabling us to set up an internal intranet with a separate set of resources from the publicly available network.
For the remainder of the rotation, we worked on a presentation for the annual Quality Conference. Each year, at the Quality Conference, there was a juried exhibition hall, where each district had a display. For our display, we decided to put together a PowerPoint presentation that showcased many of the projects and advances that our district had made. After viewing the presentation, which ran approximately twenty minutes, the attendees played a game called "Who Wants to Be A PennDOT Extraordinaire" (remember this was at the height of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire craze.) I programmed the game, in both Flash and Perl. Although it was a rather simple game, there was a lot of testing involved to get all of the bugs out, which is important experience. The presentation ended up winning first place, which was rather impressive as we had been in last place the year before.
During this rotation, there was only one major project, a migration from Office 97 and Windows NT 4.0 to Office 2000 and Windows 2000. Learning from our errors the first time around, we conducted significant training so that things were much smoother. Other projects we had included replacing many of the desktop inkjet printers with networked printer, which proved to be a challenge to set up. We also worked on implementing databases for the company directory and upgrading the database systems used to pay the contractors who do the construction projects.
Aside from project work during this term, I gained some other valuable experience. Our department had grown to having eight interns from having only two when I began. My boss was out of the office a lot for both business and health reasons, so in addition to my technical work, I had to act in a supervisory role, by assigning work for my colleagues to do, assisting the newer students when they had problems, and in some instances, sitting in for my supervisor in meetings.