I have begun a Ellucian internship working in DevOps
My first job related to my degree. I worked for Ellucian for 7 months previously as a help desk technician. I had good experiences with them and after a recommendation and submitting an application I have gotten a internship. If you do not know what the company Ellucian does, they offer IT solutions for higher education. If that is meaningless jargon to you, they essentially handle technology services for colleges and universities. They assist more than 20 million students. Having an issue with your student account? Calling that tech support line may end you up talking to an Ellucian employee. On a college's website trying to do homework? That website may be hosted using code written by Ellucian.
Currently there is a little something called COVID-19 going around so my internship is entirely remote. It's kind of a weird experience living through something that will be on history textbooks in a few years. I am writing this at almost half way through the initial contract time of 12 weeks. Hopefully that will either get extended or I will be placed full-time.
So, I was interviewed by my manager Denver Martin. The posting was for a cloud devops position with AWS and python experience preferred. I explained my experience with Django, Heroku and AWS deployment using EC2 instances. The interview went well and I did get a call that I was hired and to provide an address to be shipped equipment. I found that there were several interns, around 25. They were from all over the world and from many backgrounds. After beginning the internship Denver Martin quickly setup a schedule of meetings. I was to meet and get an idea of what the major projects were for the cloud operations. This was a fantastic experience due to how much information I was able to get. It felt a bit like being inside a clock tower and getting explained what each gear's purpose is in a larger function. This is much better than what I was expecting too often with jobs you feel like you are being dropped into a warzone. Then another overwhelmed soldier is assigned to train you how to survive. They begrudgingly give you tips they have picked up and try to hand you off. Here I not only was being given the battle plans but was not handed an assignment until a week ago. Plenty of time to get situated and battle ready. Not only was the reparation put together nicely, I was selecting my own project to join.
Currently I am working on creating a dashboard using React and Python. The basic idea is the dashboard will show a table of active systems quickly. I am working with two other interns to complete the task. The dashboard is coming together and I will likely join another group/task once I finish this one. There was a dashboard before this one but it was built using three very dated JavaScript file with bugs. This project feels nice to complete due to the current technologies and finally doing some team work. I have worked on several technologies but mostly just on my own. Here I am using Bitbucket and a kaban board to complete tasks. The workflow is smooth and feels great to have the work cut into pieces. I will make another post in a couple weeks covering the internship and work I have completed.