IT Intern – The Reinvestment Fund
I will be an IT Intern at The Reinvestment Fund this summer in Center City Philadelphia. TRF is a community development financial institution that finances community businesses around their three locations in Philadelphia, Jersey City, NJ and Baltimore, MD. Their investments have resulted in 20,270 housing units, 62,700 jobs, 12.4 million square feet of commercial space, 37,740 charter school seats, 10,795 child care seats, 131 supermarkets, grocery stores and fresh food retail, 659 businesses, and 5.3 million MWh of energy conserved and created – enough to power more than 563,374 homes for a year.
I worked under the CIO in the IT&S group responding to Help Desk issues, configured and deployed new and existing equipment, and managed the server and network infrastructure. I also worked on three individual projects that included diagramming their network infrastructure, configured and deployed a project management solution for a department within TRF, and find a solution for software license management.
My daily responsibilities were to assist my colleagues in their day to day duties, and most times this meant taking a piece of something they’re working on and finish it myself. In the beginning, I was getting their assistance and guidance in everything I did but in the end I was doing things completely on my own. Routinely each week, I would check on the backups of all of our systems and data. Weekly, we had several backup jobs run which would back up each virtual machine, and the SAN to hard disk. Once the backups were on hard disk, they would be transferred to data tapes and then moved off-site. When I started, these jobs were poorly scheduled and ran into each other, causing bottlenecks and close management. This required us to spend a lot of time and attention on something that should be running in the background. A consulting company we have been contracting with re-tooled the jobs and the schedule, but I helped strategize how the jobs should be set up before the consulting company changed them. I would monitor the status of the jobs each week and pack up the tapes to be brought off site. When issues with our severs or network would arise, I would troubleshoot them with my colleagues. There was one issue that was a simple fix, but it was hard to diagnose. What happened was the system time on the servers was somehow set in the future, and it was causing a lot of our applications to break. One of them being the application that controls the electronic door locks for our suite. At first we were almost stumped as to what was causing the issues, but I looked in the system logs and noticed a different time. From there I was able to find the place to change the time back to the correct time. It was a simple problem, but my boss was impressed with my ability to examine everything going on and diagnose the problem. Another thing I was responsible for was obtaining quotes and purchasing new equipment for IT to use and also for users. In some of those cases, I was able to make decisions on what to purchase.
For two weeks, one of my colleagues was out due to a family emergency. This time actually presented a great opportunity for me because I was able to step into his full time role and show my boss my ability to do so. I was responsible for operating the help desk at my lonesome, and monitoring some applications that my colleague closely worked with, including the backups. The issue I described above also happened during these weeks. I was able to make decisions I would normally consult my colleague for, and I successfully made it through the weeks without any issues. My boss was very impressed with my performance, and at the end of the time was when he announced to me that he wanted me to continue working with TRF throughout my senior year, and discuss my future with them after graduation.
The projects I worked on individually filled the gaps of time between when I was managing other things. At the beginning of my internship I was tasked with updating and redesigning the network diagrams for all of our offices and disaster recovery site. I was also tasked with finding a solution for managing the software licenses we owned. By the end of the internship I was able to finish both of these projects with merit from my boss. An additional project was given to me in the middle of the internship, and it was something my boss didn’t have the time to complete. What he wanted me to do was configure a piece of software called JIRA for our marketing department to use to track their projects. I was able to complete this project in a week and presented it to my boss and the marketing department and provided instruction and support with how to use it after my initial presentation.
I will be continuing to work at TRF part-time throughout my final two semesters at Temple, and hopefully continue there after graduation. I loved my internship experience!