Wow, this has been a journey.
I first got the call to work at Ellucian in the Summer of 2019. The position was for doing help desk work. I drove to the office for my interview and was very excited after entering the office space. I asked how old the building was and was told it was less than a year old. All desks could be raised to a standing desk, had two monitors and a laptop. The lights were dimmed and the atmosphere was cozy.
After completing the interview and starting soon after. I began a two week training to learn how to help callers from a specific school, Tarrant County College District or TCCD. I was being hired on with about twenty other people. We were told we were guinea pigs for a TCCD ticketing system. TCCD represents Ellucians biggest client for calls. They are a Texas school with a lot of students meaning a lot of calls. The ticketing system we were being put on was Cherwell, normally the company uses Service Now for ticketing. The experience with Cherwell was not entirely present. I would come to know many quirks about the system which I would do my best to work around.
I ended up working at that position for over 7 months. I became really good at my calls and was got really good at what I did. I worked the night shift, meaning there were fewer calls coming in. Of course there was those calls of students having tech issues 10 minutes before their assignment was due at midnight.
There were some tough times. There was a hurricane in August which almost hit Florida at my time working there. I was taking six classes during my time working there and would often get scheduled 40 hour weeks. I kept myself busy, when I was not on a call I was doing school work.
However, if there was no school work to complete I was doing hobby work. I even downloaded Android Studio and began developing a phone app game at this time. The game supposed to be like Pokemon but with cards. I still might make it eventually but it may be in some other medium than a phone app. Maybe a browser game first?
- 1st video was me creating characters scripts to walk around town
- 2nd shows the ability to talk to one and make choices.
- 3rd shows moving to different maps.
- 4th was an early video and is really just a masterpiece of game design.
Looking back I made good friends and had a great time. I enjoyed my time there and am very thankful for a recommendation from Mary to be able to now move to a devops position. I doubt my career with Ellucian will be over for a while. Now I am starting a position for Ellucian which has me working on AWS. Ellucian offers a lot of solutions for schools not just taking calls. Most of these services require AWS but they also require things like Jenkins and Ansible to continuously deploy automatically. Over the course of my internship I will be learning these things and likely take my AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. I have already been placed into two projects which I can work on. One is writing Ansible to quickly deploy services and another is creating a dashboard in React. I will make another post about these experiences over the course of the 12 week program.