I had the opportunity to be an IT Intern during the Summer at a local civil engineering firm thanks to the career fair hosted by ACM Manoa during Spring 2023. I came in not expecting too much besides help desk duties. I came out probably gaining more experience with configuring and securing networks than a year of reading could have obtained. Now there definitely were some help desk duties from time to time which is just the nature of an IT role. However for most of the time, I was practically given equipment to go out and build my own test network lab environment.
I started off by configuring physical network switches, routers, and firewalls to enable communication between these devices as well as out to the Internet. Then, I set up a host with a VMWare ESXi hypervisor to host several virtual machine servers. Among many other things, I got the chance to configure a DMZ through implementing firewall policies, set up a Linux jumpbox alongside a layered set of rules to force this machine to be the single point of entry between internal and external firewall zones, and deployed a containerized Graylog centralized log management platform. It was a fun (and paid) learning experience which I hope to use as a basis towards preparing our upcoming National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team for the 2024 competition season.