Link Internship
Animas High School has a unique internship program for juniors. LINK has students spend 3 weeks without classes working full-time at their place of internship. This unique opportunity gives students a chance to cultivate their job skills in a real-world environment, as well as get to explore what a potential career pass entails. For more information, visit ahsinternships.weebly.com.
Business Description
I interned at the Leahy Center for Digital Investigation at Champlain College. I choose to work at the Leahy Center because I had an interest in cybersecurity and digital forensics after I attended a summer camp there. Computers were always a major interest of mine, and I had previously done some similar work with the Leahy Center.
https://www.champlain.edu/centers-of-experience/the-leahy-center
https://www.champlain.edu/centers-of-experience/the-leahy-center
Spring Update
Post for March 16th. I made the decision to intern at the LCDI because it was a place I was familiar with and knew I could achieve solid work. I am a bit nervous that my project will never come to fruition. I want to take this opportunity to look into what jobs within the field of cybersecurity are like and get some experience in a field I have interest in.
Winter Update
Post for January 15th. I have reached out to a few potential mentors via email to work on securing an internship. I reached out to a few professional sports teams but was rejected by all as they don't take high school students. I also reached out to a few programming companies, and the LCDI where I spent a summer camp this previous year.
Fall Blog Post
Post for October 10th. I am feeling excited by the amount of possible internships I can take. I am not entirely sure where I will intern, but right now I am most interested in either a school internship or a tech internship. I am not sure if I want to look into working in education or computer work, so I would like to see how either field feels so I can make a more informed choice.
Reflection
4/22/2021
I learnt a lot of interesting things from my internship. The most important was that despite cybersecurity being interesting to me from afar, the actual work that it entails failed to catch my interest or speak to me. Working on the coding I had done one the elastic stack was very interesting, as it was a very new field of programming I hadn't reach out into yet. However, it failed to connect with me on a deep level, despite having a great mentor and lots of interesting opportunities. My LINK showed me that cybersecurity is no longer a path I can see myself following as an adult. I have decided that I will pursue a different goal within my interests, and will not study cybersecurity in college. I now have to redefine where my interests lay and follow another path. I decided to go back to the sports analytics I was interested in but could not secure an internship in, as it continues my interests in programming and brings in another passion of mine in sports.
I learnt a lot of interesting things from my internship. The most important was that despite cybersecurity being interesting to me from afar, the actual work that it entails failed to catch my interest or speak to me. Working on the coding I had done one the elastic stack was very interesting, as it was a very new field of programming I hadn't reach out into yet. However, it failed to connect with me on a deep level, despite having a great mentor and lots of interesting opportunities. My LINK showed me that cybersecurity is no longer a path I can see myself following as an adult. I have decided that I will pursue a different goal within my interests, and will not study cybersecurity in college. I now have to redefine where my interests lay and follow another path. I decided to go back to the sports analytics I was interested in but could not secure an internship in, as it continues my interests in programming and brings in another passion of mine in sports.
My Project
For my project, I installed and initialized an ELK stack on a pair of virtual machines. and ELK stack is a set of 3 programs, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that are used by system admins to monitor the status of a computer, checking incoming and outgoing requests. Each of these programs serves an important role, Elasticsearch collects data from a computer, Logstash collects the data logs from Elasticsearch and categorizes them, and Kibana is used to display and read the logs on the server. However, unfortunately near the end of my internship the LCDI sysadmin accidentally deleted the virtual machines I was working on, stopping me from finishing my final set ups and running the system.
