Introduction

In a world where entry level jobs are requiring years of work experience, an internship can be a great way to get your career started. My name is Bruno Sato and I was an international student at the University at Buffalo. In this blog I will share my internship experience at Advance2000 and how it could be helpful for students trying to get their careers started in the Buffalo/Niagara Falls area.

Some of the main engineering skills that any company is looking for in a new hire are: hands-on experience, attention to detail, good communication and teamwork skills, self-motivated/autonomous, and problem-solving skills. In the following sections, I will explain how I was able to acquire and learn all those skills throughout my time at Advance2000.

My experience at the company so far can be separated into 4 main efforts: building servers, auditing, AI project meetings, and a file sharing application.

Building Servers

Advance2000 has its own on-premises datacenter filled with servers, and I got the chance to help with building new servers for a customer. It was amazing to visualize and understand how the different parts came together and how each of them had a defined purpose. Within a couple days, Advance2000 was already making me feel like I was making a difference!

Every part that we install is noted in a piece of paper so that we can keep track of every part number and every hardware piece for future troubleshooting. Additionally, we give our customers the opportunity to personalize some of the parts being put in our servers, so that they can have their storage, virtual machine capacity, and computing processing power all fulfilling their specific needs.

This was a great opportunity to acquire:

• Hands on Experience: By installing the hardware pieces repeatedly, awareness and intuition on how to balance the delicacy of some pieces with the grip strength needed to install others is created. The confidence that was built in me was very helpful for building a different set of servers for a different customer. These skills can only be gained by doing the physical work yourself. Not by reading, listening, studying, or watching; only by doing it yourself.
• Attention to detail: Although it might seem like an unnecessarily meticulous requirement, writing down all the installed hardware’s part numbers by hand turns out to be beneficial in the long term. Writing it down part numbers by hand greatly increases our precision on which parts are being installed on which server. This will be important when maintenance has to be done in the server, possibly after years of its assembly. With all the information gathered, it is possible to know exactly what day and from which package the part needing maintenance came from.

Audits

After building servers, my next task was to audit the firewall policies from our customers. Working on this project showed me how strict and serious companies should be regarding their cybersecurity. This task involved navigating through every customer’s firewall policies in Sophos Central, one by one, making sure all of them matched what we had registered and were considered safe according to our security standards.

This was another good opportunity to learn about attention to detail: part of the auditing job was also to update customers’ firewall policies on our control spreadsheet, filling out details making sure every aspect of the policy matched our standards, and if not, indicate which customers needed immediate attention from our Security Team.

University at Buffalo- AI Meetings

Because of my interest for software, I was able to get involved in a project from the University at Buffalo that we partnered with. This project was about integrating a machine learning model to our service desk. We provided the students with a dataset of our service desk tickets and solutions, and we challenged them to come up with a model that could provide a solution given a new ticket.

It was a great experience to be able to help the group of students and find common ground where the solution generated was both valuable for the company’s future and also relevant for their studies at UB.

We had a total of 9 meetings, and this helped me with my communication and teamwork skills: Having the technical knowledge on how to use our ticket system platform and how the AI model was being trained, I was able to effectively share my opinions and give the students guidance on how to move forward and improve the project results. Some of the data terminology and the final product vision were misunderstood by the students, and I was able to help them use the appropriate piece of data to train the model efficiently and shape their output into something that would be user-friendly for our service desk employees, instead of outputs that only machine learning scientists were able to understand.

File Sharing Software

For my current project, I was asked to build a file sharing software that is able to share files through a server, cache those files in client’s local computers, and allow users to lock specific files according to their needs so that there are not data conflicts or data corruption.

To accomplish this, the end product was based on an open-source software. After setting up the server, there were a lot of configuration files that needed to be changed in order to satisfy our requirements, and this turned out to be a very demanding task, especially because everything was brand new to me. I had to learn how to configure and navigate through the software on the spot, and that quickly increased my troubleshooting skills throughout the process.

Once all the necessary files were properly changed with the appropriate keywords and I had all 3 features working, it was now time to rebrand this software so that we could proudly share this potential new product to our customers. To do so, a coworker and I had to build our own version of their desktop app and change their branding. Building the desktop app from the source code was a lot of manual debugging and very time consuming, which showed me how much detail and work is put into these software applications in the real world.

By having my own project, I was pushed to enhance my:

• Problem Solving skills: This was my first time working with a Linux operating system, and I had to configure this server by looking for specific files in the server, changing some parameters and making sure everything was still working on the front end and on the back end. For every step of this process, I had to do my personal research to understand how to solve each problem and why my changes would often not make any difference. Ultimately, I was able to tweak the correct files in the correct spots and ended up with a satisfactory result.
• Self-motivation: I was the only person working on this project for a long time, and there were some days that I felt stuck and that the only way I could solve my problem was with someone else’s help. Given enough time to think, try, and make mistakes, I always ended up finding a solution. That taught me that the best way to master new things is to make mistakes and learn from them, and that takes time. At the end of the day, I realized the parts of this projects that I learned the most were the ones that I had the biggest problems and spend the most time trying to find a solution.

Conclusion

Finding jobs have proven to be a hard task, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. As a student at the University at Buffalo, I did everything I could to learn technical and soft skills and be considered qualified for jobs. Unfortunately, however hard we try to be qualified, hands-on work experience usually has more value for hiring companies. Advance2000 was kind enough to give me the opportunity that I needed to get work exposure and get my career started, and maybe this can be the place where we can change your life by helping you take your first career step too.

By: Bruno Sato, Technical Support Specialist I, Advance2000