dunningh681

Day 8 –

As my work experience comes to an end and I work through my last day I couldn’t help but feel a little sad that I will be missing out on the antics of IS department. Despite the solemn nature of today I recognize the great time I had helping out the great people in IS appreciate much more what they do for us here at CA. Through the mistakes and solutions we came up with I learned many great tricks and also learned some new things about computers and networking. This experience has greatly helped me on my journey to college and got me thinking about the future and I thank all those in IS for helping me along the way. From missing tablets to fixing software issues I learned what it means to be in a computer field and my interest has been peaked.

Day 7 – Helping out around campus

In our second day of searching it didn’t take us long to find the tablet we were looking for and once we found it, we celebrated. With that task out of the way I helped students and teachers alike resolve their computer problems if they bought or still had their computers. While helping out one of the major perks was that i had the opportunity to try out the new computers for next year. With a host of computer savvy people around me i had a great chance to talk about all the aspects of the computer and some of its amenities (of which there are many). A highlight ,however, was that I got to use a floppy disk and see how it works which was quite interesting. Overall a good day of helping out around the school and using some cool tech.

Day 6 – Searching (part 2)

After collecting the middle school tablets and sorting them into the places they needed to go, a problem arose. The business office reported that there were a few tablets unaccounted for and as soon as i heard this i knew another search through boxes and computers was upon us. Luckily for us many of the missing computers were simply being kept by the students for a little longer and after finding most of them we narrowed it down to 3 pesky tablets. We searched through boxes and piles of computers but to no avail for the day. As we had other matters to attend to it was placed on the backburner but we will surely find the tablets the next day we search.

day 5 – Looking into computer science

With many students being off campus, Monday was slow as always. With this extra time I had, I took it to talk to some members of the IS department about computers and computer-related fields. By talking with members of the IS department including Mrs.Mckenzie and Mr.Rokuskie I got some advice and some help when it comes to thinking about my plans for the future specifically about what facet of computer science I might like the best. In talking I learned some valuable knowledge about computer science including some jobs that are contained within computer science. I was also lucky to have spoken to Mrs.McKenzie who has had many different jobs in the field and was able to relay some knowledge about the ones that interested me. I asked her about being a technology/business liaison and what its like and she also told me about networking and its importance in the growth of cyber security.

Day 4 – It’s always the last box

The 4th day of my work experience started off like normal. I got in for the day and helped out around the IS department, helped Mr. Rokuskie box up charging cords, and also attempted to trace discrepancies in the tablet purchase sheets. This all was quite normal until it was realized after a count of the boxes that there was one more tablet somewhere in the wall of boxes that didn’t belong. We counted a few times all 240 tablets but the database had 239 registered. Someone might simply say “well, just register one more in the database”, but we needed the serial number and had to register the specific missing tablet. We spent a while opening boxes and checking for them in the database each one after the other came back as registered. After searching through almost 25 boxes of tablets I opened the last box and pulled out the first tablet. I read the serial number and was about to put it back in the box until i heard “Its not on the list!” and of course we found the tablet we were looking for in the very last box.

(the stack of boxes we searched through)

Day 3 – donations

With more computer Re-Imaging to do on my third day I got in and got to the grindstone, or the USB drives and keyboards in this sense. While I cruised through the tablets I needed to work on to be donated i started to slow down due to the quality and stickers on some tablets becoming questionable. Nevertheless I procured better quality tablets throughout the day and got all my assigned work done. Ontop of re-imaging the tablets I also had a lot of fun helping the others in the IS department move boxes of tablets waiting to be sent to Lenovo. Although we got the tablets loaded up we had time to chat and had a great time while loading the boxes.

(seen below is the legendary IS department whiteboard with useful vocab words)

Day 2 – Middle School Madness

My second day of working with the IS department started off quite well and very productive. Firstly I was excited to finish re-imaging the stacks of computers set before me on day one and getting that task complete felt extremely satisfying. After those computers were done I was introduced to a cart full of even more computers waiting to be prepared for sale to teachers and staff. Interestingly with these computers, their startup includes the virtual assistant Cortana talking the user through the setup. When you have 10 Cortanas all talking over each other at varying times it sounds a little bit like the Seagulls from Finding Nemo. After working on those for a while it was time to collect the middle schoolers tablets which as one can imagine takes the entire IS department to handle. During the process, I was walking in classrooms helping teachers and checking names on tablets for collection all while wading through a sea of middle schoolers. After all the chaos we had carts stacked high with the collected computers and with the rain pouring outside we stowed the tablets in a closet and ended our days work.

Day 1 – Joining the IS team

I started my work experience this morning as an odd job taker of sorts. Carrying computers to box them up, moving boxes of charging cords and helping Mr. Qiao with some TV trouble. But after the short morning of errands, I was put up to a more pressing task of re-imaging computers turned in by the upper school. After an informative instruction on how to re-image a computer by Coach Moore, I sat amongst the towering stacks of computers waiting to be processed and got to work. Things were a little slow at first with me getting my bearings and maybe misspelling a few commands here and there. Once I got my system down though, I was cooking with gas and knocked out almost 40 computers greatly depleting the stack I started with earlier. I was glad to give the IS department a hand and lighten their workload by getting the computers imaged for them and I’m glad for the organization skills I gained while working today.