The first 50 hours of my IT internship with Apple Federal Credit Union went very well in my opinion. This is my first job opportunity in the tech field as a whole, so the experience for me so far has been very insightful and exciting. 

Most of the first day was spent in orientation with other interns, and then with our respective departments within the office. I was the only one brought onto the IT team, as well as, the only intern working full time. The IT service desk is the frontline for all IT incidents within the company. The service desk is under the umbrella of IT operations (IT Ops). So we occasionally work alongside the company’s infrastructure team and enterprise apps team (EAS). Most of our interactions happen because the service desk receives the tickets for the IT Ops department. So sometimes we get tickets that are intentionally or unintentionally meant for either the EAS team or infrastructure team. In those cases we escalate the tickets to the correct department. 

I have enjoyed my time so far with the service desk team. I work closely with our team that consists of tier 1, 2, and 3 service desk engineers along with our manager.  Everyone on the team is very knowledgeable and willing to answer any questions I may have. We also have a mix of contractors and employees of the company so I have heard multiple perspectives of the job and field as a whole. I received a ramp up plan that lasts for 6 weeks that gradually increases the amount of responsibilities that I have. 

Since I am very new as both a tech employee and an intern I have not been assigned to work on the ticket queue. Instead, I have been reading articles in our database that have explanations of all the software tools and equipment that relate to the job. More importantly, I have been shadowing as much as I possibly can. One thing that I have been told and learned myself is that the articles are more for reference rather than to learn the job. By shadowing I have been able to learn how to troubleshoot various types of problems. I have shadowed trips around the office and even trips to other credit union branches. The branch visits were very informative when it came to how the system works and the equipment used in credit unions. I have even had a 1 on 1 meeting with our branch technical lead to give me a detailed overview of branch equipment. Shadowing the tickets has been the most informative when it comes to troubleshooting practices and utilization of software tools to solve problems. I also had fun learning the laptop imaging process and preparation of the laptop before deployment to an employee. 

Overall, the experience has been valuable and rewarding. The team is not very large so it’s more personal and they all have fun personalities. Personally, seeing others work makes me want to help out, but it also looks very daunting at times. My main objective now is to continue to learn how to effectively troubleshoot and prepare myself in order to work on the ticket queue eventually.