As I told you at the beginning of this semester, my job at Cisco Systems Inc. is a great learning experience. So far I learned a lot, but as we know in ever-changing IT field, learning is a never-ending story. Let me describe you my work place.

I work in a building 500, Mad River Lab in Boxborough, MA.You would say that I work in a cubicle as most of the employees in IT nowadays do. Well, you are right, but not totally. I have my own cube with my nameplate and everything, but I spend 10% of my workday in the cube. Most of the day I am working in a big computer lab. Our lab obtains around 120 racks sorted in 12 isles and divided into five sections, with unknown number of switches, routers, servers, PBXs and other networking gear.

What are my job responsibilities? Well, let me start from the basic ones that I was doing at the beginning. As a Customer Advocacy Lab Operations coop, I am in charge of maintaining inventory updates, making sure the lab is neat and clean. So, those are basic assignments, not very exciting.

However, as my knowledge increased, I got new responsibilities. Now, major part of my job is solving cases for engineers. My colleague and I support five teams of engineers that provide technical assistance to enterprise Cisco clients. On an engineer request, we recreate our client’s systems in our lab, in order to identify the problem and assist engineers in finding a solution for their problem. Sometimes these cases are very simple, but most of the time cases are complex and require a lot of reading and preparation before we can set them up. You need to know the equipment, configuration parameters, which version of operating system (IOS) you should use, how to set up connection ports, etc.

When I started, all this was a complete unknown for me. Nevertheless, in these five weeks of my employment, there wasn't a case that my colleague and I did not solve. Man we are good :) Benefit of working in a company like Cisco is, is that you are surrounded by experts and you always have a person you can ask for help. If I cannot find a person with an answer in my location (Boxborough), I can always contact people in Cisco centers in RTP (North Carolina), Richardson (Texas) or San Jose (California). Cisco = the Human Network.

Well, I am still learning, at work and at home (preparing for Cisco Certified Network Associate exam), and I believe entire semester will be like that. As always, I will keep you posted.