Journal #31 - Job Shadowing

My job shadowing experience was very interesting. I was able to shadow a bunch of different people in a couple of different fields of work. I had the privilege of going to Illinois Department of Central Management Services. Don Warren, the manager of the whole building, took me on a tour of the CMS data room. The room was on the third floor of the building, and only certain people had access to the room. It was around 30,000 square feet of raised flooring, which is used so that the cables can be run under the floor for organization. He explained that the rows of tape data was being transferred to digital storage, so a lot of the space would soon clear up for more servers. Some of the computer equipment was water cooled, which I found to be very interesting. After finishing the tour, Mr. Warren dropped me off with workers in the building. The first person that I shadowed was an IT person. Through out the course of an hour or two, he showed me what his normal day was like. He started by installing applications onto a couple of the different servers in the building, but while he was working on that, he received an email asking him to fix a field on one of the state sites. He also was working on another major project, so he had a lot going on at one time. After I finished shadowing him, I was moved to the networking group. Even though it has nothing to do with the job, they were really funny and relaxed. They took me back up to the data room, but this time they walked me over towards the LAN area. They talked to me about fiber optic cables and the technological advances that are coming around, which was the first thing that I actually understood all day. They talked about fiber cable that instead of sending one wavelength of light through it to pass data, it would send 70 different wavelengths of light in the tube, and because they were all different wavelengths, the data would not interfere with anything. It was really cool stuff. I was most interested by the LAN group. The final person that I was able to shadow was a guy who worked with Unix. I was only with him for a few minutes, but he was the most basic introduction to the field, which was very helpful. He told us that he mainly worked with Unix servers, as opposed to Windows servers. He was very insightful to all the questions that I had to ask him. Overall, I really enjoyed my time job shadowing, but I will be going into the Engineering field for sure.