Reflection #2

Tristan L Cole

3/9/26

CYSE 368

Spring 2026

Professor Teresa Duvall

TA Joshua Russell

Old Dominion University Help Desk

The first few days were orientation. I and three of my peers met with an hourly employee who would become our trainer for initial inception. From the onset, we watched videos covering terms and conditions of how a help desk technician should accommodate their customers. Those costumers being the students and faculty of Old Dominion University. As a part of the onboarding training program, we covered scenario-based situations that would teach us how to handle and interact with said customers.

Four days a week we sat in a conference room, going over our lines until our trainer felt comfortable enough for us to answer actual tickets. The tickets we covered were mostly the most frequent question and that was how to do a password reset. It amazed me how many passwords resets a day we had to do. I did not realize that so many people, students and faculty alike, really do not know how to reset their own passwords. Of course, we had prepped lines to say to walk someone through the reset, but I got nervous hearing my own voice out loud, so I stumbled through my first few resets. One time, I had a customer hang up on me because I did not know how to do a 2-factor authentication on the spot over the phone. My trainer sent them an email with directions on how to set up 2 factor authentication on a new phone then do the password reset. We do more than just password reset. The help desk is the bridge between the rest of the ODU community and the technical division. Costumers come in with all sorts of technical questions ranging from passwords resets to adding people to distinct groups with budget codes to assigning roles and permissions. A lot of what Help Desk does is triage the small problems and assign the more complex tickets to higher groups such as Tier 2 Help desk or Desktop support. I think why most entry level jobs in the Information Technology field start at help desk is because this is where someone would learn how to trouble shoot the easy stuff without being able to see it in front of them. I would say it is far more difficult to walk someone through doing a password reset over the phone then it would be for me to do it myself if they were to come to the office. I also believe that a lot of people must start off at Help Desk because of the soft skills that can be gained from talking to a stranger and giving them instructions to complete a task that is as mundane as resetting one’s own password. I learned that I must communicate and speak more clearly. I must be more precise with my words and even on occasion ‘water down’ my words so that the customer can better understand me.

We do not have any specials tasks or assignments other than to become more efficient with our methods of handling tickets. I do hope that in my time here, that I will be good at my job so I can move up to higher tiers. I love learning new things. I forgot to mention that while I have yet to work with the other Help Desk technicians other than my trainer, I have met vice CISO of ODU. He came into our conference room briefly and gave us a few words of wisdom. I thought that it was genuinely nice of him to do so.