IS 480 Journal & Progress Report

I worked 40 hours this week, bringing my total hours for the quarter to 360. This week was packed with tasks, and honestly, it’s hard to keep track of everything I did. There’s never really a set list of things to tackle — issues pop up randomly, and I handle whatever comes my way. I started the week with 28 more laptops that needed either the DRC testing software reinstalled, Windows updates, or a full reset. After that, I helped a teacher at the other high school who was having Wi-Fi issues. I suggested using a USB-to-Ethernet adapter to hardwire her computer for a more stable connection. She wasn’t a fan of that idea since she wanted to keep using her external keyboard and didn’t want to be "tethered." I explained that it was either this or continue dealing with Wi-Fi drops until we could figure out what’s going on in that room. Later, I teamed up with our tech specialist to troubleshoot a middle school projector that wasn’t displaying anything. Aside from the rack being c...

 As I reflect on my internship experience, one key area I would strive to improve upon is expanding my technical skill set, particularly in networking and server management. While I have gained a solid foundation in troubleshooting hardware and software issues, I feel that my exposure to more advanced IT tasks, such as network configuration, server administration, and cybersecurity, has been limited. One of my biggest frustrations during this internship was that I wasn’t allowed to work on servers, networking, or administrative tasks, even though my job title suggested that I would be involved in those areas. Higher-ups preferred to keep those responsibilities restricted to employees with more senior job titles, which left me feeling somewhat stagnant in terms of skill development. To improve upon this, I plan to seek out more opportunities to gain hands-on experience with networking equipment, cloud services, and enterprise-level IT infrastructure—whether through personal projects...

During my time in this internship, I have gained valuable hands-on IT experience that has strengthened my technical skills and problem-solving abilities. At the beginning, I was concerned that I wouldn’t know how to handle certain tasks, but I quickly realized that I already had the knowledge needed to complete most of the work that came up. Despite this, one of the biggest challenges was the complete lack of structured training. The hiring process itself was disorganized, with poor communication from the start. I didn’t even know what time I was supposed to begin on my first day. When I asked, they simply told me to show up whenever I thought was right, so I decided to start at 8:00 AM based on my previous job’s schedule. From the beginning, there was little to no guidance. I was given my staff laptop, login credentials (both standard user and admin), and a charger. After logging in, they briefly introduced me to ClassLink, the main program they use, and then sent me to the high schoo...

This week I worked a full 40 hours bringing my quarter total to 320 hours. This week I expected to get computers in to repair as WEDA testing is still going on. Only the first three days this week they tested and the rest of the days had no testing. This was nice as there wasn't as many laptops to come in that needed updates or to be reset. A nice addition for Wednesday and Thursday was the System Admin let me configure our server to host Virtual Machines.  The host server had windows server 2025, our newest server OS (or other ones are running server 2012 and 2019). We are slowly trying to shift the server roles to the newer servers and update them to server2025 as the older versions are no longer going to be supported. So on the host machine I configured Hyper-V and restarted it to enable the feature, I was remoted in so I had to wait a few min for it to restart so I could re-connect to it. I then set up a VM and passed in our Volume License key so the VM was activated. This is g...