Today was the last day and our capstone was a pitch competition, or really just a pitch exhibition, where we all presented the pitches on the different Cisco architectures we chose. There were pitches from products like Meraki to WebEx, and it was very nice to see each person’s presentation. There were a myriad of different approaches to the topic, from side by side comparisons to heavy contextualization. The project was a fitting and satisfying end to our time at Cisco.
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We got the whole day to work on our pitch presentation. My presentation will be on Cisco Enterprise, a series of network solutions designed to improve business networks in the areas of reliability, efficiency, security, and ease of use. I also met with my mentor to talk about the pitch and I met with someone else at Cisco to grow my network.
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Today we had a lot of discussions about careers, from career programs to early in career ideas. We were introduced to CSAP, or Cisco Sales Associate Program. This program allows college alums to get rigorous technical training on each of Cisco’s products while also building a network of field workers and virtual managers. This phase lasts for six months, after which participants are provided another 6 months to find a virtual position, which they will hold for a year. After that, they can move on to a field role. Networking is very important throughout both the process and wider careers because it allows you to leverage contacts to get to where you want to be. Another final takeaway I have is the wide variety of majors that come to CSAP and Cisco as a whole. There are people who majored in Communications, Electrical Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and even Chinese, who all ended up here. This goes to show that majors don’t define what you do in your career and that your passion is more important to follow.
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Today’s activities entailed more laid back and open discussions with professionals. An interesting one was with a post-sales engineer who was able to explain to us how she helps customers after their purchase. I was interested in this career because, while it still heavily incorporated sales elements, it seemed to require more technical knowhow than pre-sales engineering. Examples of some of her projects are optimizing client networks to have less downtime and helping customers configure Cisco products. She also told us about TAC engineers and sales engineers, which provided helpful context.
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One of the more interesting things we did today was listen to a systems engineer talk about what he does on a daily basis. This would allow us a glimpse into the day to day life of this certain profession, which can help us make informed decisions about what we want to pursue in college and beyond. We also learned about what he did before Cisco. He did an internship with the DoD, and had summer jobs at other places like Amazon. He also told us about college and how he swapped his major, which is totally normal and fine. Overall, this was a helpful window into the life of a systems engineer at Cisco.
Today was a general orientation day, where we went over two main things: Cisco culture and the pitch project. The main takeaways I had from Cisco’s culture is that it is a competitive yet supportive environment and that they encourage community service. The pitch project entails us learning about a Cisco product and then “pitching” it in an attempt to get our school to buy it. Our audience will be both the higher ups and IT people, so we will need to understand both the business and technical effects of our choice product.
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Today we went over three things: Meraki, Data Centers, and AppDynamics. Focusing on the AppDynamics, it is a system that allows users to monitor the performance of apps. It reports on their speed, crashes, and errors, and even allows you to trace the problems to specific methods in the code. This makes it very easy to fix problems in apps and provide the best user experience. The presenter also went into detail about less thought of ways of how this is important. If Amazon’s website is slow during the input of credit card information, users could become worried about the safety of their data. AppDynamics allows these problems to be identified and fixed quickly.
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Today we went over three of Cisco’s security products: Umbrella, SecureX, and Duo. SecureX was the most complex because it acts as a suite of systems from anti-malware software to file monitoring to firewalls. At the heart of SecureX, it allows users to find, track, and isolate threats before they can cause harm. SecureX is related to a group of threat intelligence researchers and telemetry agents called Talos; this group monitors internet traffic to help spot vulnerabilities and zero-days before most other groups and eliminate them before they can be exploited. It was interesting seeing the innovations Cisco has that allows them to be unique from their competitors.
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