NBC Universal Internship
During the summer of 2017, I was fortunate to be a part of the NBCU Media-Tech internship program. For ten weeks, I completed various projects such as writing technology service descriptions, interviewing application owners to assess the business value their app brings to NBCU, preforming in-depth comparative analyses on various MySQL options available to our team , and project managing a team of nine on a corporate assigned “Innovation Project”.
The team I was assigned to during my internship is called the Open Platform Technology Team. Our team uses the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Platform to host twenty six business-critical applications for NBCU. In addition to hosting these applications on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, our team provides all open source technologies that these applications need to thrive during their life cycle. The types of technologies we provide include, runtime environments for applications via PCF, Spring Cloud Services, authentication services, messaging services, content management services, data persistence services, application performance management services, object storage services, application performance acceleration services, and search services.
During my internship, a number of my projects focused around the database and search offerings we provide to the Application Teams as this is a very large part of our business. The first project I worked on, writing technology service descriptions for our Maria DB offering, PostgreSQL, Mongo DB and Elasticsearch taught me a lot about enterprise DB services. I learned how storage engines impact performance, the security features and architectures needed to secure a database service, what technologies are used to backup databases, how database services are designed for high availability and disaster recovery, what technologies are used for monitoring, the cost drivers for DB services, how our teams provide enterprise grade support for our DB services, and more. My second project, collecting business value of applications our team supports gave me the opportunity to see real use cases for the services we offer, and how the applications we support help NBCU thrive. My third project, comparatively analyzing potential MySQL offerings such as Cloud SQL from Google and PCF MySQL tile, taught me how to think critically about whether a technology will support an enterprise’s business needs. Lastly, my work on the team Innovation Project taught me project management skills such as scheduling and coordinating meetings, setting project goals and project deadlines, creating an environment where team members feel like they are free to contribute, keeping a project on scope, and ensuring deliverables meet quality standards.
Overall, I feel like my internship was a success! I am leaving NBCU more confident, capable, knowledgeable, with a passion for IT, as well as NBCU as a company! I am extremely thankful to my bosses for being great mentors, and hope to hear soon about whether I have been accepted into the Media-Tech Associate Program.