Working as a Cloud Engineer intern at Maximus for has been great. The first week was onboarding with all the other interns which was great because we got to get to know each other and expand our networks. Myself and two other IT Software engineers set up a standing meeting every week to discuss what each other are working on and collaborate. It feels like navigating the corporate world if often about who you know. The corporate structure is something new but useful when starting a new career. I feel like I will learn a lot of good organizational and logistical skills here that only a large company with so many moving pieces and projects can offer. Half of the battle is learning the jargon of a new industry. It becomes its own language and you have to be able to talk the talk when you’re trying to work at the higher levels.
My public speaking skills are being sharpened in a way because I am the “new guy” in all the meetings so I have to introduce myself and answer all the questions about where I’m going to school and what it is I’m studying. Thankfully, nobody has their cameras on and I’m not expected to have mine on either. I think this is going to be common in the remote IT/software

engineering world. It is comforting in one way but it also means you have to be good at what you do, naturally. You can’t rely on social currency as much as technical expertise.
As far as working on actual IT tasks, I have been shadowing one of the senior engineers while he goes over the monthly server patches. We run a program called BigFix which manages endpoints and virtual machines. It goes down the list of current patches pulled from the Oracle repositories and installs everything outstanding. We go through the records and make sure all patches were installed successfully and do manually installs if necessary. Manual installs meaning manually running the dnf command in the Linux terminal, not actually manually installing the patch.
I’m surprised by how much we have used the AWS console for a lot of tasks instead of Terraform or another IaC as I was led to believe in all of my research. I understand I will have to constantly be learning in this industry, often on my own time and dime. Every night I’ve been poking around on the AWS console in the free tier so I can feel more comfortable the next day and show that I’m here to work and learn as much as possible.
Another project is the UK Standardization Project where were standardizing the all the procedures, patching schedules, BCDR plans, etc. which is a lot less technical and much more paper work.
Overall, the first 50 hours have really shown me what it is like to work in a corporate company and the inner workings of server administration. I’ve grown to appreciate the value of networking much more being in a company that has so many employees and opportunity for learning and advancing.