Hi everyone! This is a big week at USC as it is CAREER WEEK! There are tons of businesses coming to campus for the many events being held. These include the Viterbi Industry Networking Event (VINE), the Viterbi Career Fair, and the many information sessions held by individual companies. A fun outing that I get to take part in starting Wednesday is Viterbi Trek. This is a Viterbi sponsored trip to San Francisco to visit the facilities and meet executives from Yelp, AirPR, Electronic Arts, and Youtube. I am very excited to see what I learn from this experience in NorCal. With all of these great opportunities this week, I thought I would tell you more about my internship this previous summer with CenturyLink Technology Solutions.
I started interning with CenturyLink Technology Solutions at the beginning of summer in May. I was working alongside their solutions engineers and technical sales consultants in their office in Irvine, California. During the first part of my internship, I began working with the marketing team in order to familiarize me with the lingo and acronyms used in the big data industry. Since many of these members are based out of Arizona, I took part in many conference calls and skype sessions. I was given a project to lead that consisted of planning and seeing out a campaign to thank all of CenuryLink’s loyal customers. I decided to organize a big event following the expansion of the data center. This consisted of fun activities including a game truck, burger truck, and live music. Another project I worked on was hosting an event at our data facilities for AFCOM, a large data center company. Many executives from tech companies came to our facilities, received tours, and listened to information sessions from AFCOM and Centurylink employees. It was a great learning experience to meet all of these executives.
Irvine Data Center Expansion Space
After working with the marketing team, I began assisting both the technical sales team and the solutions engineers. These two groups of people work very closely together. Both technical sales representatives and the engineers acquire customers, attend client on-site and off-site meetings, as well as construct RFPs, Request For Proposals (which are basically contracts). My role in this process was understanding the flow of the data center and what services we offered. Centurylink has three areas of service. First, collocation is the leasing of space for company’s own data equipment. Second, managed is the space, equipment, and maintenance provided by Centurylink. Lastly, they offer cloud services, which is a public network for their data storage. I was able to learn the language in selling these items as well as the way in which the engineers tend to problems in the data center. Such issues include overheating of equipment, rewiring of networks, or internal requests from clients.
Server Room at the Data Center
This was a great experience to learn more about big data and its storage. I look forward to seeing the opportunities that exist in the future with Centurylink. If you interested in reading more about my internship experience, be sure to check out my blog about my internship with Providence Medical Center last spring at https://viterbivoices.usc.edu/jacquie/my-experience-with-engineering-in-healthcare/. Also try to look at the other student blogs for more internship stories and ways USC has helped them get jobs! Fight on!
