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IBM Canada

Overview

As part of the IBM Analytics group, Master Data Management (MDM) serves as an important part of IBM's portfolio in offering customers a robust view of critical entities stored in applications and databases. It grants companies the ability to link and connect data from single or multiple domains, leading to powerful consumer insights.

As a member of the MDM Performance and Benchmarks team, our team's role is to ensure the latest MDM builds perform and exceed expectations on a variety of platforms, from Windows, Linux, PowerLinux, AIX, to Power8. This means developing powerful robust tools to deliver fast and accurate performance results.

Experience

I've really enjoyed my 16 month IBM internship. Coming into the role, I was apprehensive on expectations and how much of an impact I would have. Even though IBM itself is a large company, I'm fortunate to be working on a relatively small performance team (5 members) within a smaller IBM product. This has the benefit of giving me greater self independence in pursuing and prioritizing projects that benefit our team's role.

A major project I was able to be involved in was the Performance Regression Automation Tooling (PRTA) project, in improving the MDM Advanced Edition workload and building the Standard Edition workload. PRTA was a unique opportunity for me to become involved in every step of performance testing, from build deployment, running regression tests, to post-processing and publishing those results on a central website. It also exposed and gave me invaluable experience in other areas of IBM, including IBM WebSphere Application Server and DB2.

I've also been involved in smaller scale projects, such as designing the HTML/CSS final report for the IBM MDM LogAnalyzer tool. This tool has now gone on to be included as part of the MDM product to be used by customers worldwide. This is incredibly exciting to see my work become part of IBM's public facing portfolio.

My work term has also been great because of the amazing intern community that IBM hosts for the interns that come onboard. The Future Blue team does an amazing job of planning events throughout the year, such as movie nights and fun evenings out in downtown Toronto.

All in all, I'm glad that I chose to come to IBM for my internship. The work environment here has been great and I'm happy that I was able to use the skills learned in school effectively.

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Queen's University AMS

Overview

Queen's University Alma Mater Society (AMS) is Canada's oldest student government society, established in 1858. Serving the interests of over 15,500 student members, the AMS enhances student academic and extracurricular experiences.

Experience

My journey to becoming IT Officer started 2 years back when I entered Queen's as a first year student. I was fortunate enough to be hired on as a part time IT staff, a role that I got rehired back the following year. This introduced me to the world of IT support, working on Active Directory account management and password resets. It helped me to improve my communication, in explaining to the customer/staff member I was helping what the solution to their problem was. Having two years of IT experience prepared me well to apply for the IT Officer position the year after.

The job was challenging but very rewarding. Besides growing my technical IT skills, I also improved my communication and interpersonal skills by acting as a manager to six part-time staff. As their manager, I was in charge of hiring, training, and delegating tasks to them as they came in.

Being IT, other departments would frequently contact us with requests to build them new sites, upgrade their computers, or provide them with assistance with any number of issues. Having to prioritize and sort through the requests was made much easier through the iTrack ticketing system.

I found the non IT related parts of my job also very interesting, such as budgeting and planning the financials for the office. I had lots of help from our company's controller, who gave me great pointers and provided me access to past year financial records as a guideline.

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Queen's University Teaching Assistant

Overview

As a teaching asisstant for the Queen's School of Computing, I was in charge of leading lab hours for the introductory to python course (CISC 101). My responsibilities included answering students' questions, marking tests and assignments, and proctoring class quizzes.

Experience

Having taken the exact same course I was TA'ing gave me a good perspective on the areas that students will struggle with. This intro to python course was offered to students "with no prior background in computer science or programming". This made it especially important for me to offer the students relevant and accurate coding advice in starting out.

Besides being required to be available every week for a 2 hour lab session, I also offered my time outside of those hours to those that needed extra help. The hardest part for many students was that the course difficulty ramped up significantly after a few weeks. It went from printing a simple "Hello World" to the console to having to integrate if statements into loops and setting up variables as counters. Given that class is only one hour long and there isn't much time to talk to the professor afterwards, I wanted to make myself as freely available as possible as a resource.

Since I was also in charge of marking quizzes and assignments for the class, I was able to note the most common mistakes students made and point them out to the class during lab hours. This really helped out some students improve over the course of the term.

Overall I really enjoyed sharing my passion for programming with others. If I had the opportunity to TA again, I would definitely do it.

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Peace Arch Hospital

Overview

The Peace Arch Hospital is a small community based hospital located in White Rock, British Columbia. It offers services such as a 24/7 Emergency Room, Critical Care, Residential Care, and Cardiac Rehabilitation.

Experience

I first started volunteering with the hospital in Grade 9 during high school. This was around the time when I had my sights set on entering medical school and becoming a doctor. I started out working in residential care, which provides long term care to those who are unable to take care of themselves.

The hospital would typically pair us up, working 2 hour shifts twice a week. Our main responsibility was to offer any assistance or comfort we could to the hospital residents. This could be helping to serve meals during dinner or grabbing a warm blanket for them. I found after the first month, the majority of my time was spent in maintaining weekly conversations with a few regulars.

I can still remember one of the residents who would always be excited to see me come by every week. Her name was Rose, she was in her late 80's. Every week would be different. Some weeks would be quiet, where I would sit with her in the dining area watching the colourful fish on display. Other times, she would tell me all about her kids and grandkids that come to visit her every month. Rose was most proud of all the pictures she keep in her room, of her grandkids playing soccer or her son's wedding. As she was suffering from dementia, I would sometimes hear the same stories over and over again. But I didn't mind; she seemed so excited and enthusiastic to tell me about her life that I couldn't stop her if I wanted to. When I reflect back to my days in residential care, the number one thing I miss the most is my conversations with Rose.

My time in residential care lasted two years before I was given an opportunity to move into a senior role volunteering in the Emergency Department. As the ER is much more fast paced and hectic than residential care, volunteers need to be able to handle any situation that comes up. Since I had no official medical training, I wasn't allowed to help out with any operations or procedures. Instead, my role was divided into two main roles: assisting recovering patients and working as a liaison for the department.

My first role was very similar to the work I did in residential care. I would sit with any ER patients that wanted to talk and see if I could help in any way. That could be grabbing them a drink of water, checking in with the doctor for them when they would be released, or just keeping them company. I got to chat with people from different backgrounds, some of whom would offer me great life tidbits.

My second role as a liasion was to facilitate communications between the hospital and patients (including their family and loved ones). While I mostly did this within the ER, I also made myself available to the rest of the hospital, such as if a family needed instructions on how to find the ICU. The most common question I got asked was in the ER waiting room: you can probably guess what it was (hint: people hate waiting).

I would not have traded my 4 years volunteering with the hospital for any other experience. Although my ambition to become a doctor shifted in university, my passion for volunteering has not. Having seen the positive effects, I'm a true believer now in life-long volunteering as way to give back to the community.