James Wiggins

My name is James Wiggins and I am a TSTM major. This summer I worked as an intern at USC Computer Services as a residential network technician (or resnet tech). Effectively what this means is that whenever there is a student that lives on campus that has difficulty connecting to the USC network and the internet myself and about 7 others are responsible for resolving the problem. This can be a little tricky sometimes because during the school year there are over 8,000 people who connect to the USC network on campus. The experience has been wonderfully fun and the skills I’ve gained from this internship are certainly invaluable. I’d like to share a few of the experiences that made my internship memorable.

One of the trouble tickets that I worked on during my internship was in Cliff Apartments. I went on location to resolve this ticket with another resnet tech who also happens to be a TSTM major, Richard Brown. We were both also enrolled in Dr. Brown’s Telecommunications class (TSTM545). When we got there we found the problem was that the student was attempting to use a device called a router that also had an integrated switch in order to connect multiple computers to the USC network. A switch is the correct device to do this, but because it was also a router it had something called a "DHCP server" enabled. We were both able to determine that when the student was attempting to receive a network address (via DHCP) the students router was responding before the USC network was able to respond, thus giving the student and incorrect network address. Once we disabled the "DHCP server" on the router everything worked as normal. The reason Richard and I found all of this so interesting is because literally just days before we were talking about a scenario like this in Dr. Brown’s class. It was really very satisfying to see that not only does what we learn in our major have a real world application, but that even as an intern in the IT field we were already using the knowledge we’ve gained.

Later on in the internship I was working with one of the full-time desktop technicians in the College of Nursing. They had just received about 100 brand new desktop computers and we needed to prepare them for use by installing all the necessary software and patches. The way we did it was by installing all of the software and patches on one of the computers and making sure it was exactly the way we needed it. This took a little over an hour and a half to complete because the changes we were making were so extensive. Then we made an image of that computers hard drive and stored it on a portable external hard drive. One by one we transferred the image to all of the other computers by issuing text commands at a DOS prompt. It took about 10 minutes per computer to transfer the new image onto it. Just think about all the time we saved, 10 minutes versus over an hour? All of the text DOS commands we used were covered over and over again in many of the TSTM classes. These are just a few examples of the kinds of interesting things I learned during my internship at USC Computer Services. After having gained some real work experience in the IT industry I now feel very confident that the TSTM major has prepared me for the kinds of challenges I will face on the job. I hope to work in the IT industry as a network technician and eventually move into IT management and I know that my TSTM degree has given me the knowledge required to achieve these goals.