My job shadowing experience was in the Office of Information Technology at Salt Lake

Community College (SLCC). I worked with the Enterprise Infrastructure group what are
responsible for networking and internet systems at the College. I had originally wanted to job
shadow a paleontologist, but it is very difficult without connections to make those arrangements.
I also looked to volunteer at the Aquarium, and Dinosaur park, and the animal shelter, but I was
unable to arrange this for different reasons. Dinosaur park never responded to my email. With
my Dad's help I was able to arrange the experience at Salt Lake Community College. I think my
Dad really wants me to look at a career in computer technology so he wanted me to see what I
thought.

I started the day by watching a man named Nathan control the security cameras in all the SLCC
buildings. He showed me how he quickly gets cameras that have issues running again. That
was interesting to me, but it seemed kind of boring sitting all day watching cameras. Soon after
that I shadowed a man named Gabino.

Gabino took me to see the data center where the servers for SLCC are. Servers are higher
powered computers that run most of the big software systems for the college. He said the server
room is the brain of all of SLCC. If the servers in the server room go out then all of SLCC would
go out so it has to be running 24/7. Gabino then brought me back to the office. He showed me
how he ordered new network equipment like cabling, routers, switches and wireless access
points.

After working with Gabino I shadowed Robin. Robin is responsible for managing the phone
system that runs over the network (telecom). She took me with her and showed me how she
worked on emergency call buttons like the ones on an elevator. She had me grab one of the
new phones that SLCC was installing and go with her to the Student Center.

Once we were in the Student Center where the phone needed to be installed, she showed me
how she checks to see if a room needs a phone and where to put it. She got out a tool that she
plugged into the landline. The landline is a physical network cable. The phones run on physical
cables instead of wireless. She plugged a phone cable into the port. She then got a wire and
wrapped it around two other cables. She grabbed a tool that looked like a remote and pointed it
at the cable and it made a ringing sound. She told me that means that it works. Then she
pointed it towards a different landline, and it made a static sound. She said that means it has an
electrical interference. We went into one of the telephone closets where all the chords to all the
phones in the buildings were connected. She told me because of the way the building is
designed they couldn’t have just one closet for the phones they had to have two because they
roof wouldn’t allow the telephone cables to just run anywhere they had to run on certain paths.
We went back to the network team’s offices.

As soon as we got back there was another problem reported. There's a new yogurt machine in
the cafeteria in the student center. The people responsible for it wanted to set it up on a wireless
connection. The wireless connection wasn’t working for the machine so the network team had to
hard wire it to the servers. The only problem was that the people managing the yogurt machine
wanted it to be directly connected to the whole server. For security reasons, outside
connections like that aren't allowed on the main server. They had to find a way to connect the
machine without going through the main server. They had to have it so the machine could send
and receive messages. They worked on rerouting the yogurt machine connection to get it
working.

I found out that most of the people working in the Information Technology (IT) departments
didn’t have IT as their first choice. They wanted to do to other things like archeology, write or do
art. The different interests make everyone become friends because they have a lot of interesting
things to relate to. I could be in the same situation. Paleontology is a very competitive field
because there are a lot of people interested in it. My Dad wants me to look into IT as a fall back
in case Paleontology doesn't work out. That is why he encouraged me to choose an IT job for
my job shadow project.