Summer Desktop Associate at PHEAA
I spent the summer of 2014 and 2015 working at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. This was my first look into the IT industry at a medium-sized business (headquarters office of 2,500 employees and 4,300 agency wide), and has been one of the most valuable experiences of my career so far. During my time there, I was exposed to many of the background IT functions that must be carried out to keep a business running. Some of those functions include, inventory of hardware, software life-cycles and upgrades, telecommunications, network domain administration, and routine Help Desk issue resolution. The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency is one of the nation’s leading student aid organizations. Started in 1963 and created by the Pennsylvania General Assembly, PHEAA serves millions of students and thousands of schools through its financial aid and loan servicing programs.
Most notably, I was involved with the introduction of a new naming scheme for the workstations across the headquarters office. In that process, I learned the importance of creating a naming scheme that correlates the type of device and the location of the device in the office. I was also introduced to the imaging process for this particular company. Imaging Windows 7 desktop computers entailed installing the OS through a Ghostcast server (which was pre-packaged with standard software for the company), updating the hostname, adding the workstation into the domain using Active Directory, updating group policy, and installing additional software specific for the employee that was receiving it. I was also introduced to an in-house ticketing system. Employees would submit incident reports via the Help Desk group, and then my group (Desktop Support) would further resolve those issues. The biggest takeaway from the ticketing system was the process of documenting every resolution that was reached and how exactly it was reached.