City Of Virginia Beach Internship Reflection Paper 3
Shaquile Garces-Phillips
Old Dominion University
CYSE 368 Cyber Security Internship
July 30 2025

I once saw a quote online that said, “At this point in my life, if I can’t remember my password, I just hit reset.” That really stuck with me especially now, after experiencing how often passwords need to be managed in a professional setting. Depending on the job, individuals may be required to maintain multiple logins for different systems. This is a critical security practice because if one set of credentials is ever compromised, the others remain secure.

Over the past two weeks of my internship with the City of Virginia Beach, I’ve been heavily involved in password resets and monitor deployments. Specifically, we’ve been resetting passwords for users accessing Cerner Millennium and DOMA. Cerner Millennium, now a part of Oracle Health, is a comprehensive Electronic Health Record (EHR) system widely used by healthcare organizations. It brings together clinical, financial, and operational data into one system, giving providers real-time access to patient information for improved decision-making and care coordination.

However, password resets aren’t automatic. A help desk ticket must be submitted and assigned to our team before we can assist. Once a Cerner password is reset, we notify the user by email, providing a temporary password along with a secure link that allows them to set a new password.

The process is similar for DOMA password resets as well. Once we receive the ticket and it’s assigned to us, we log into the DOMA system with our own credentials, unlock the user’s account, and select the option to send them a temporary password. One key difference is that, unlike Cerner, the DOMA system handles the automated email to the user we simply unlock the account and initiate the password reset from within the system.

In addition to password resets, we’ve also been conducting monitor deployments across various buildings throughout Virginia Beach. At first, this task seemed simple, but it quickly proved to be more involved. We had to identify each user scheduled for an upgrade, replace their old monitor with a new one, and reconfigure the display settings. This included extending the desktop across three monitors instead of duplicating the same screen, allowing users to multitask across multiple displays efficiently. Once completed, we repeated the process for the next user.

After finishing a building, we would return to our office and update SharePoint by recording the old asset tags and entering the new ones. Since the new monitors are newly added assets, we had to input detailed information such as workstation type, status, storage, AD user, organizational unit, program, AD supervisor, purchase order number, asset type, model number, and city asset number.

So far, we’ve successfully deployed over 80 new monitors throughout the City of Virginia Beach, with a few more to complete before the end of my internship. This experience has taught me how much work goes on behind the scenes in IT support and has shown me how even small tasks can play a critical role in keeping systems secure and operational.