Annual Report 2017-2018

The mission of the Project Management Lite Internship program is “To strengthen the aspiring talents of NC State students through the grasp of additional knowledge in information technology and project management”. The PML program focuses on bridging the gap between what students learn in the classroom and what employees learn in the real world. By providing students an opportunity to work directly on real projects alongside experienced professionals, the PML program is able to build the strengths, talents, and knowledge of its interns.

The Project Management Lite Internship began in Summer 2014 with two interns from the Poole College of Management. As of Spring 2018, the program has grown to 36 interns from both PCOM and the department of Computer Science.

This year’s group of interns focused on assisting OIT with major 2FA and DUO security initiatives requiring Faculty, Staff, and Affiliates. The intern team, as directed by OIT, increased security standards by activating to Two-Factor Authentication and DUO this past year on all NC State staff email accounts to help prevent phishing, hacking, and any other ways to compromise an email account. Besides the team moving to the 2 Factor Authentication, we have helped promote it throughout the university at multiple venues. Some of these venues include the IT Club, Cyber Security Awareness Month (CSAM), Campus Connections, and 2FA workshops.

Message about the Coordinator

Verna Little works as a coordinator and supervisor to the PML internship program. She works closely with the interns to help guide them and connect them with different areas of OIT to ensure the growth and development of the program. With the support of OIT’s staff as mentors, the intern team has grown in both numbers and strength, reaching farther into the Office of Information Technology and making great strides in the partnership between NCSU employees and students.

Goals

The Project Management Lite team works towards helping OIT reach their strategic goals in:

Innovation
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Governance
Collaborate
Foster Connectedness of Communities

Innovation

The intern team created an intern handbook that outlines the procedures if the intern program from the onset of being hired into the program. A collection of data from previous years was re-sampled and organized into a much more efficient and effective procedure and assists interns throughout the year to reference. The handbook is iconic for the program.

As a specific example of how our interns have benefited the university, Trish Palmer’s interns in the network group of the Network Operations Center (NOC) of OIT have taken over handling a large number of the groups’ ServiceNow ticket requests, allowing the group to switch from a reactive approach operation to a more proactive approach.

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

The interns assisted in rolling out Two-Factor Authentication for NC State faculty and staff through various events, such as the 2FA kickoff celebration at Talley Student Union and numerous “2FA-day” walk-in appointments to assist in enrollment. Next steps will include implementing required 2FA for NC State students.

Governance

This year the intern team developed intern roles and liaison groups to assist in developing strategic and operational goals that govern the business processes in all areas of the program. Our groups included HR, Marketing, Outreach and Recruitment. The team has 36 interns now allowing for easy group collaboration but after more than doubling, the team developed a new governance process. The team leads would meet to collaborate on team goals and goals of individual liaison groups. The entire team would meet for short periods to touch base on projects and team progression. Liaison groups would meet individually with team leads to discuss goals and delegate team tasks, the groups then managed their individual projects while periodically updating the team leads.

By splitting the team into separate groups, interns were able to use their skills in specific areas and gain experience beyond their OIT projects. This allowed for quicker progress, quick collaboration, and helped to ensure all goals were being worked towards. The liaison groups addressed the areas of marketing, outreach and engagements, recruitment, and the collaboration with IT Club.

Collaborate

The Project Management Lite Intern team made major strides this year in the efforts of collaboration. Over the summer, the interns worked to develop a video. The team continued during the school year by creating contacts with teachers, giving presentations on the program, developing focused project teams, and expanding the collaboration efforts across disciplines.

Each year, Outreach, Communications, and Consulting works with the Project Management Lite Internship Program to help show what items in the IT world can be recycled on Earth Day. NC State University holds an event all day on Earth Day in the brickyard to show students all the different ways and how many objects can be recycled. The internship program works with OCC to educate participants on green IT practices, provide a means to recycle electronics, and offer prizes to the students that successfully complete educational games. Part of the intern’s role on the project is to promote the event through Twitter, WolfBytes, and the OIT News as well as having other interns at the event to help man the booth.

Foster Connectedness of Communities

Part of the intern master project was helping create a way to spread IT throughout the university and surrounding community. One way we did this is by creating a Twitter account. The outreach team got the Twitter account approved by OCC and will tweet information to the community. Some tweets will be to promote various IT events that the internship program will be doing or events that OIT as a whole will be hosting. We will also use this account to promote 2-step verification and other security techniques that students can refer to in order to protect their devices from being compromised.

Future plans include setting up an official LinkedIn profile for the PML internship program, which will further PML’s reach as an internship program, and allow current and former interns to link to the program on their LinkedIn pages. This will also allow us to post articles, accomplishments of PML’s many intern projects, as well as intern features to showcase where our interns end up after the program.

Graduates

This year, 13 of our interns graduated and left the PML program:

Leigh Peel (Fall 2017): Leigh was hired by the NC State Graduate School as a Business and Technology Applications Analyst.
Vinay Gupta (Fall 2017): Vinay has started work as a Software Engineer at Cerner Corporation, in addition to founding and serving as CEO of AdwiseData LLC.
Kunal Buch (Fall 2017): Kunal joined the Samsung R&D Center in Austin as a GPU Verification Engineer.
Arun Jaganathan (Spring 2018): Arun will be joining Mathworks as an Application Support Engineer.
Karina Patel (Spring 2018): Karina will be starting at Deloitte after graduation as a Technology Risk Consultant.
Sean Cherlinczuk-French (Spring 2018): Sean will be starting graduate school at Duke University.
Srinikitha Naramakula (Spring 2018): Nikitha will be joining Google as a Network Engineer.
Daniel Shiels (Spring 2018): Daniel will be joining Citrix Systems as a Technical Analyst as part of their Leadership Development Program.
Victoria Britt (Spring 2018)
Mary Celine Braza (Spring 2018)
Joshua Crowell (Spring 2018): Joshua will be joining Infosys Limited as an Associate in their Data and Analytics Unit/Big Data.
Alessandra Mitchell (Spring 2018)
Crystal Thao (Spring 2018)