Computer Support Specialist 1 Intern
Over the summer of 2018, I completed an eight-week internship at C&T Enterprises in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. C&T Enterprises is the parent company of five small-to-medium sized utility companies across the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania. These companies include Tri-County Rural Electric Company of Mansfield, PA, Claverack Rural Electric Company of Wysox, PA, Citizen’s Electric Company of Lewisburg, PA, Wellsboro Electric Company of Wellsboro, PA, and Valley Energy of Sayre, PA. C&T Enterprises has a total of 221 employees and is based out of Lewisburg, PA.
My position at C&T was Computer Support Specialist 1 Intern, and during the course of my internship I learned and accomplished many things. The largest project I accomplished during the course of my internship was the building-wide upgrade from CAT 5 to CAT 6A network cabling in our Wellsboro location. In addition to helping run the new cables, I was single-handedly responsible for removing the old ones. This entailed standing on ladders, crawling through ceilings, and generally getting very dusty. After the new cabling was run and the old cable was removed, the next phase of the project was a reconfiguration of the building’s server room. After I removed all the old cabling, we emptied the oldest network rack, removed the old core switch, and readied the old network rack for removal.
In between all that, I spent days shadowing the CIO of the company, Joe Bubacz, my direct supervisor, and the IT Manager and main network engineer of the company, Justin DeVine, toured the five company locations, and assisted all 221 employees of C&T Enterprises when they had computer issues.
Over the course of this internship, I learned a great deal about networking, VLAN routing, switch programming, and firewall maintenance and upkeep, all of which is central to my future career as an IT professional. Particularly, the server room remodel and reconfiguration relates to the course Enterprise IT Architecture, which I have taken here at Fox. This internship gave me real-life experience with the planning, implementation, and upkeep of Enterprise IT Architecture, and proved to myself that I picked the right major and career path.