Twelve fall/winter NCDIT interns celebrated their accomplishments and lessons learned with their supervisors and other leaders at 3700 Wake Forest Road after more than six months with the department.
The interns gave presentations on March 28, their last day with NCDIT, about their work, greatest takeaways, skills learned, significant challenges and future career plans. The interns had joined teams across the department, including Cloud Services, Enterprise Architecture and Innovation, Natural and Cultural Resources, Public Safety, Transportation and the Western Data Center.
The interns contributed to projects including annual asset inventory at facilities statewide, gap analysis for the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles modernization and predictive analytics for managing ServiceNow tickets. Their work spanned areas from user support, documentation management, endpoint management support and network services to intelligent automation, operational data analytics, cloud services process development, systems analyst and special projects.
Jolisa Fields, who interned with Public Safety and Adult Correction, said her supervisor introduced her to many different aspects of IT service management to give her a broad foundation.
“My greatest takeaway from this assignment is the importance of continuous learning and process improvement and adaptive to new technologies in the IT environment,” Fields said. “Pretty much all the technologies I went through during this internship were brand new to me. I got to work with a bunch of different teams, see how they work, see what their processes were, and I'm just excited to apply these skills in the future.”
Jenny Aviles-Gervacio and William Puckett, two network services interns with Transportation, said they learned from building networks in facilities across the state.
“It allowed us to really see it from the layer one perspective, like how they're physically connecting these cables and how they're plugging power for these devices to start providing the site network,” Aviles-Gervacio said. “Instead of just like looking at it from the perspective of the network engineer who's behind the computer, we’re looking at the terminal from inside the device and seeing if everything is being connected.”
“Our greatest takeaway from this internship was mostly understanding how network is really the backbone of every organization,” Puckett said. “It is what allows the applications to work. It allows us to communicate with one another."
The interns also took advantage of the many professional development resources available through NCDIT.
“We get free access to all the courses, and I found it very beneficial to kind of learn at the beginning of the internship,” said Tung Tran, who interned with the Cloud Services team. He took courses in Amazon Web Services, Azure and machine learning and earned certifications in Lean Sigma Six and Azure fundamentals.
In May, NCDIT will welcome 17 interns, who will work for the department through August.
Launched in spring 2023, NCDIT’s four internship programs have hosted 61 students and workers. The programs are designed for individuals who want to enter the IT field but do not intend to pursue a college degree, students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, members of the neurodiverse community and individuals who are pursuing tech-related college education or experience.
