Coal Wells and his time at Progressive Working with Network + Telecom and Mainframe Systems
Coal Wells is a senior in the McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies, majoring in Information and Telecommunication Systems (ITS). He recently applied and was accepted to the School's 4 + 1 program, so that he can earn a Master of Information and Telecommunication Systems (MITS) degree with one additional year of study. He then intends to go for his Ph.D. in Information Systems. He is from South Point Ohio and had the opportunity to work at Progressive as an IT Systems Engineer intern last summer.
Coal was on two different teams during this internship: Network + Telecom, and Mainframe.
At Network + Telecom, he received work tickets for problems, which he then had to fix; from broken phones to helping an employee locate a site, Coal was the man for the job. He used Avaya systems and Remedy to help monitor and see issues.
On the mainframe side, he learned all about the mainframe and how to diagnose problems, which typically arose whenever the application development team tried adding something new. He learned that a lot of Fortune 100 companies use mainframes for company processes due to their reliability and high uptime.
Throughout his internship, he gained technical skills and knowledge. At first, he felt like he was thrown into the deep end of a pool. However, he learned how to tread water, ending up with a valuable and productive internship experience.
"I didn’t know what I wanted to do and getting to experience a big portion of corporate America through the position really opened my eyes to discontinue my pursuit in that sort of work. So that’s very good," Wells said.
His career advice is to attend every career fair you possibly can, and “to throw your resume into the void.” In addition, he recommends educating yourself about the field and the major to market yourself better to employers since it is a unique program.
In his free time, he enjoys reading and play videogames.
"I was very fortunate to be selected for the internship. I went in lacking technical skills and the class ITL helped tremendously in improving and understanding my technical skills. I feel like I learned a stupid number of concepts through the internship and there’s only more to learn. It’s constantly evolving and there’s just always something new to learn and that’s kind of why I enjoy it so much," Wells said.
The McClure School strives to become one of the best Networking Programs in Ohio, and thus giving our students the opportunities to gain hands on experience in the field is important. To see what other kinds of internship opportunities McClure students have been involved in, check out Josie's and her time at OIT!
The McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies strives to offer the best academic programs in the IT (Information Technology), the game development and the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) industries. Our programs and certificates cover numerous aspects of the rapidly changing industries of information networking, information security, data privacy, game development, digital animation and the academic side of esports.