Cybersecurity Internship

This course allows students to volunteer to work in an agency related to cybersecurity. Students must volunteer for 50 hours per course credit and complete course assignments.

Course Material

Reflection Paper Three

Working here, I have learned just how bad the cyber hygiene of users is. Not to mention a reassurance of the fact that the public are unable to read. I can send instructions to these users all day and they will read at most the first 5 words before sending an email back saying that the solution doesn’t work. They also don’t seem to like to do anything that requires them to use a computer to solve their issue. I have also found users that will request a password reset after a single failed attempt of their password, before hearing what we need to do to do an admin reset and then trying again and discovering that it works.

 

I understand people want immediate results and as a result of this, this helps reassure me to remain calm and rational with these users. Patience is a virtue and I must embody it. What I am often told to do is if we send an info collection email and they respond with something that is not the info we are requesting to escalate. We first see if this new response is relevant to a possible solution. If the information is not relevant we resend the collection email again in the hopes that they will read the email and send us what we need for resolution. Honestly, it gets pretty funny how ridiculous some of these ID requests can get. People send us Facebook profiles, selfies from 5 years ago on vacation, a link to their directory page on ODU’s site, social security cards, and birth certificates. Not to mention when we are on the phone with a user sometimes they will just provide their password unprompted over the phone. Users will also try to disable their two factors and reuse the same password over and over for everything. It just makes my skin crawl with the lack of security concerns. I just work on the tickets help the user and laugh about it later when it’s over. If I get a user that seems reasonable while I’m helping, I’ll tell them about some good habits to have while using a computer. What I’m hoping for is that the user will be able to call the help desk less and be able to gain a better understanding of basic computing.

Final Paper

Introduction

Working anywhere for anyone has its ups and downs this document is a somewhat brief rundown of my working experience, at my university ITS help desk. This document will be broken down into multiple parts. These parts will cover each of the points I’m making with a header to represent chapters of my talking points. This is to make it easier to read and digest for any reader who might want to review what working at the help desk is like.

I decided to work at my college help desk because I had prior experience in a similar position, that was a Geek Squad Agent. I enjoyed solving issues that would require me to learn something new or meet interesting people. As well as the rewarding feeling when I could solve an issue quickly.

 

When I joined the organization I didn’t have any actual help desk experience. So when I was hired I hoped to achieve 3 things. 1. Learn how a normal business conducts IT that is not in a customer-facing retail environment like my old job. 2. Hone my customer service practices, which would help me de-escalate panicked clients. 3. Gain an understanding of the systems and work environment of an IT office space, along with the work ethic that would be required.

The Start Of The Internship

Old Dominion Univerisity was founded in 1930 by the collage of Willam and Merry and eventually became its independent university in 1962. The collage offers a variety of degrees and opportunities for learning for people of all races, colors, and genders. With all of these people still teaching and learning in 2024. There are bound to be problems with the technology that The University deploys and utilizes in its teaching efforts.

 

When I started my internship with an orientation about what I would be doing and what kind of people I would be working with. I was given scenarios and quizzes I was to take research and submit to my manager to show where my troubleshooting skills lacked and what I needed to improve upon. I also had to watch what felt like movie-sized videos detailing customer service culture and how to handle upset clients. I was about a year into my time at the university. At this point, I had called and emailed the help desk only once or twice whenever I ran into a problem I couldn’t solve on my open end. Each time the service was fast and easy to understand. When I finally got a look at the other end of the help desk I could see why, the training left me with the impression that issues were handled with care and efficiency. I saw that ODU put care into crafting an IT team that could run their systems.

Working Environment

The environment is very relaxed for a help desk. I would say the most stressful points for ticket and call flow are during the start of a semester, midterms, just after the holiday, and then finals week. Other than that the work is slow or steady. My 3  direct supervisors sit right behind me in cubicles. Their style of leadership is to be actual leaders, which is nice. They make tools and prompts for us to use and help us out when things get extremely busy,  overly complex, or need to be escalated to a higher tier.

I hope that the next job I have will have leaders just like that who are willing to be leaders instead of just managers. Above those three, there is Clif who is the highest manager that talks to us. Then above him, there is Candace who I often see as she is weather coming into the office or leaving for the day. If she needs the help desk to do something she will talk to Clif who will talk to Stefan or just send us a message on teams going over what changes will be occurring in the coming days.  With their leadership, we have been able to tackle all issues and tickets that have been thrown our way and make sure that they can go to the right department for resolution if it’s not something our department can solve.

 Work Duties

My duties include managing and sorting the user tickets that come into the ticketing organizer we use called Service Now. When a ticket arrives I click on it and read it in full. I then determine if this is an issue that relates to the university, if it is then I check to see if there is a known solution for the issue. This is done by using a database that had been built and maintained by Eddie and Clif going off of this and solutions that have been tried in previous tickets. If the ticket is unable to be solved by me but can be solved by another department I’ll be able to tell using the info system in which case it gets reassigned to the appropriate team for resolution.

If the ticket is something that hasnt been encountered before I refer to one of the managers behind me to see if it is something that they know about and let them know that the info for the issue doesn’t have an article in Service now that can be viewed nor are there previous tickets about the same issue. In this case, the ticket will more often than not get taken over by them and I move on to the next one that doesn’t have a co-worker actively on it.

My other duty is to answer the phone and troubleshoot professor and student issues. Most of the time this is a password reset or someone bought a new device and needs access to their two-factor again. I am also to take care of anyone who walks into the help desk looking for some tech help. As long as it’s not a hardware problem I can solve it or at least get them heading in the right direction.  The last duty I need to take care of if I’m not closing the desk is to pick up the Hot Line calls. These calls happen when a professor is in the middle of teaching or is about to teach a class and one of the pieces of equipment they use is not actively working. Most of the time I found this is the projector. I am to take note of the room, the issue and get the ID number of the user, and then make a hotline ticket for it after radioing the in the field IT staff called Classroom Central for them to walk or take the golf cart over to the professor’s location so instruction can continue.

All of this is necessary to keep the college running daily. I process tickets, take calls, organize what tickets go to what team, and filter out spam and non-IT-related issues. This keeps the rest of the departments from having to deal with spam for issues that don’t relate to their field of work. Taking the workload of Classroom Central so they don’t need to keep going back to their office to be notified of each issue. This is what keeps the background of ODU running with little to no major issues.

Skills Gained and Already Obtained

When is started the job I had been used to dealing with clients who had pop-up ads on their laptops or those who had called one of those fake customer support numbers and virus removal. Even though I had seen it before I didn’t think that normal users would be too bad at general cybersecurity awareness. I came into the job with general Cybersecurity hygiene but thanks to what I have witnessed while I was on the job. I have learned better password making, and how to identify phishing emails more efficiently. As well as how to determine if the caller is a scammer or someone who is trying to sell something to the university. But The amount of users that try to reuse passwords or try to argue with us to disable two-factor authentication is staggering. It has made me more aware of my habits and focus on what I have been taught in the early classes of my degree.

How ODU Prepared Me For This Job

ODU’s classes prepared me early on for this, preparing me and equipping me for the kinds of attacks I’ll be able to see and stop before they even start. Basic cyber hygiene and what kinds of things to look out for. How to spot a phish. What kinds of attacks there are, be aware of social engineering. With the knowledge, I gained in my early career I was able to see all of these things. Be aware of the scams and make security my first priority. If something seemed off or questionable I would alert my supervisor to get their opinion on it. I made sure to have the users always send their Info before allowing a password reset. I would notify users of proper password-making tips and make sure they understood the importance of having two-factor authentication and why not having it would be a risk.

Were My Goals Achieved?

At the start of this document, I had goals I had set out to learn and skills to acquire during my time working at the desk. 1. Learn how a normal business conducts IT that is not in a customer-facing retail environment like my old job. 2. Hone my customer service practices, which would help me de-escalate panicked clients. 3. Gain an understanding of the systems and work environment of an IT office space, along with the work ethic that would be required.

With this in mind, I had achieved all three goals. The working environment was drastically different and had a much slower pace than what It was at my old job, I was able to slow down and look to solve the issues instead of being in a constant rush to fix as many issues as fast as possible. The office environment was relaxing and more easygoing than the stresses of a retail environment. IT is conducted more professionally here.

There is time to try all possible solutions and research issues for the best possible service we can provide for the on-campus and off-campus users. There are no quotas to meet, only that the tickets were done as accurately as possible as we don’t want to keep solving the same issue over and over again as that is what hurts our reputation. My skills in customer service have improved since changing to a focus on the phone and email. Knowing how to politely tell a user that their account has been deleted due to a new storage policy and have them not get irritated and make demands is very satisfying. I found if you say the right words and how you say them it makes all the difference between a good interaction and a bad interaction.

For example, instead of saying “Your account and emails have been deleted because you left the university, we sent you an email letting you know about this.” I would and do say “Because of a change in storage policies from our provider, The University had to make changes in regards to former student and staff accounts. Now if you have been gone for more than 2 semesters. Anything that is not essential is removed from your account. What you do have access to is the internal systems, transcripts, and tax information.” In a tone that shows that I understand their issue and understand how frustrating it is. As for the systems we use, I have gained an understanding of how an actual ticketing system tends to work in an office IT environment. Though it can be frustrating it does allow us to take more time in how we respond to a user and their issues. If the ticket is emailed in this allows time for research and information gathering such as seeing the user’s account history and past tickets to see if this issue had come up before. I feel I am now at a level of understanding that if I was introduced to a whole new system I would be able to work with it with little to no issues besides figuring out the features of a new system.

Positives of the Job

My working environment is relaxing and most of the time is very fun. When we are not busy the office will get involved in the most outlandish discussions about games, movies, or weird historical facts. Unlike retail where I am forced to stand and not even lean on something for 8-9 hours a day I am allowed to sit on a nice office chair. I am also allowed to bring my laptop to work to work on class projects in between calls and help desk tickets, this has often allowed me to make or break important deadlines for classes.  We have our regular users who seem to be making a new ticket almost daily. I do enjoy those even though they often have issues. They already know what information we are going to request and what questions we normally ask. So we can go ahead and decide whether to solve the issue or send it off to the right team for resolution. Another positive of the job is the templates we can make in Service Now. If we have a commonly emailed issue we can make a pre-typed otu ticket or response to a ticket to make sure we can get the tickets done more efficiently. Some of these prompts are common fixes, such as password resets, clearing cookies and cashes of browsers, and asking users to rester their computers, printer info, and information for a remote fix. It’s a little thing I do enjoy about the program I use and I imagine we would be more stressed if we had to constantly write out an email for every common issue we get in an hour.

Negatives of the Job

With every great position, there are aspects of that position that are not all that enjoyable to work with. Because this is a University job that means my hours are limited per week. This means on average I am working a 15-20 hour work week this is because of a policy to allow students to have time to schedule around classes and keep up with their studies. So I am overall working less and making less because I am hourly and not salary like my managers are. What also is discouraging about the position are some of the users. Some people will not accept an answer you give them and will try to fight you on a company policy or demand things that I simply can’t do. As an example let’s say I get a ticket to send to the Web Content Support team to change the planner for the upcoming football season that starts in 6 months. I use the template and send it off like normal. Only to get a call a minute later from the very user who sent the ticket that the issue hasnt been resolved yet. I tell the user that the ticket has been assigned and escalated. The user responds that it should be set to a major issue of critical importance, and then they get upset when I notify them that I am unable to change the impact the ticket has on the system.

Users tend to also have both positive and negative experiences on the job, As mentioned above we have regulars that send tickets in. This is also true for users who make a ticket for the same issue every day. Such as a daily password reset because they don’t want to write it down or just mistype it once and think that the system is broken again.  I do feel bad for these users, and I always try my best to help them as they are the people I am learning from, and working with and are future peers in the industry.

Challenges of the Job

The job does have its moments of challenging the way I conduct myself and do ITS. Sometimes users call us or make tickets about issues for systems that we support that I’ve never even heard of. This lets me work on how efficiently I can troubleshoot and research issues on the web or in our information database In Service Now.

Another issue is making sure the tickets I do are going in the right direction and have the correct problem codes attached to them, such as a ticket about the web content not being sent to Accounts or the Door Access teams. Making sure that these tickets are correct is one of the things I am reviewed for and my bosses check on them while I do my work. If I make a major mistake they will message me and have me go and correct it if they catch it.

There can be no tickets for what seems like a whole hour and then in the span of a minute the WI-FI shuts down for the whole campus and every student and member of staff is sending in a ticket, calling and ringing the hotline about it to see if anyone had already called in about the wifi being down. These are what we call major tickets and when this happens the work environment can go from relaxed to high stress as you are trying to keep track of all the users that call and where they are reporting the issues. I will be in utter chaos until Clif can get a template made for the Major Issue to help reduce the amount of time we have to spend responding and cataloging these kinds of high-volume tickets.

Sometimes users can cause problems and test the limits of my patience and calmness, but I always do my utmost to keep a level head. Even when the client is not following instructions that I am telling them on the phone or has not read all the steps in the solution and just saying they have already tried the solution I am providing in the hopes of somehow getting a faster solution than can do on my end. This is what it means to be understanding of the client. I have learned between my time at Geeksquad and here that these challenges only help me grow in my expertise and experience in customer-facing and problem-solutions.

Things I Wish For Other Interns To Know

For the future interns in this position, I would say prepare yourself for a relaxed working environment that can go from one ticket every 20 minutes to about 1 ticket every thirty seconds at the drop of a hat or in this case the moment the Wifi goes down across campus a ticket every 3 seconds. Make use of all the tools on your computer I find that Notepad is great when I’m taking hotline calls as I can just copy and paste the info I gather into service now directly. Same thing for Major issues when the phones are ringing back to back. Instead of waiting to make a whole ticket after each call during such high call volumes I will store the info on the notepad and make the tickets in bulk when things have died back down somewhat. Make sure to brush up on proper phone estimates and demeanor and watch some customer service videos on YouTube to prepare yourself if you’ve never been on the phone with a client before. When Radioing Classroom Central be just as polite as talking to users and get to the point, they just need to know where the problem is and what’s wrong with nothing more. I’ve seen one of the Classroom Central team members come into the office to tell a new hire that his radio etiquette was poor and came off as extremely rude.

New interns should also be prepared to Google things a lot as users will tend to send tickets that can be easily solved by simply copying and pasting the question into Google and clicking on one of the first five results.

Phasing is everything when it comes to responding and if you don’t use manners or proper business lingo there will be problems later in the ticket’s life and then by extension yours. Make sure to put details notes for other members of IT in the internal notes box to let them know what solutions have been tried and what user info they need. The more detailed the better, if possible offer a solution that could work that you can’t do yourself without admin permissions. Utilize the system that you have. Google, Chat GPT, and Service Now are very powerful tools if you know how to use them properly. GPT can help with phrasing and making something sound more professional, Google can help you find similar issues and their resolutions, and you can make your own premade templates in service now to make your job easier and more streamlined.  Most importantly if you can’t find the solution don’t be afraid to ask one of the managers or even Clif for assistance if all other resources are exhausted.

Conclusions And Final Thoughts

Working at the help desk has been a dream, I never imagined that I would enjoy working in an office environment so much. The culture is surreal compared to retail where you need to stand all the time and be constantly trying to push a credit card or some plan that corporate wants you to push. This job is one of the most enjoyable working experiences I’ve ever had and it makes me hopeful for future office environments on the corporate level. Understandably each company is different in how it runs things. However, I feel that this experience has brought me closer to understanding my career path and how to conduct myself in a more professional environment. With this experience in mind, I feel that I will have a better understanding of the importance of cybersecurity in my classes. How important my future roles will be and how important these classes and their information is to my success in my future field. With this, I can see myself working in a larger environment in a corporate office to help maintain security and keep IT running for the whole building. Maintaining and making sure users don’t cause the company any losses by poor cyber hygiene. I hope to better my future and whatever company I join future in keeping them and their end users safe.