Over the summer, I was an information security intern working remotely at DrFirst, a company that focused on delivering eprescriptions and other critical pieces of patient data to doctors in our area. This internship is what I used as my practicum. I was actually able to find the site because I had already known someone who worked at the site, and I contacted them about potential opportunities to learn alongside someone there. Some advice that I would give to a potential SGC student looking for a practicum is to apply to a bunch of internships online, and to be sure to utilize your connections that you have made.
During my internship, I primarily focused my work on two projects – a chatbot for Webex Teams, and Automation of PAR (Privileged Access Request) Forms. During my work on both projects, I gained a lot of exposure to specific aspects of computer science, for example networks. I participated in daily meetings with the Information Security team (the team I was working on), and occasionally with specific members of the team as well, for consultation and updates on our work.
Throughout my work at DrFirst, I was lucky enough to learn an incredible amount about computer science and many specific aspects within computer science. I was exposed to large amounts of javascript, and learned about how data is transmitted between computer systems. Over the first few weeks, I spent a lot of time growing accustomed to the workspace, and adapting to working in a group for projects rather than just working by myself. I also learned a lot about the red tape involved in the actaul workforce and how I could not just do anything I wanted because of certain restrictions and permissions that I needed to get. For my first project, I worked a lot with Webex Teams, and grew very familiar with it. I also worked extensively with Microsoft QnA maker, a Question-and-answer service that we utilized in our creation of a chatbot. Further, I was able to understand how messages are sent from end users (in this case Webex Teams) to our Load Balancer, which decrypted the data and sent the data to our Virtual Machine, which would then use an API call to our Microsoft QnA maker in order to generate a response to our questions. In my second project, I spent a lot of time working with the information security team do understand the entire process of Privileged Access forms, and how they would be received. In addition to that, I learned much about how Microsoft Form worked, which is a service from Microsoft that served as a form of Pseudocode. In addition, we used a lot of Microsoft Office 365, so I am really familiar with that now.
Doing this work at DrFirst actually dramatically shifted my career plans at UMD. Originally, I had come into UMD as an Engineering (Undecided) major, but took CMSC131 and ended up finding an internship at DrFirst for computer science, so thoughout this internship I gained a lot of knowledge as well as a passion for computer science, and I have since taken CMSC132, CMSC250, and CMSC216, as well as successfully switched majors to Computer Science. In the future I hope to continue pursuing my dreams in computer science and gaining more and more knowledge as I go.
In the end, I believe SGC and my SGC practicum have played a significant role in the trajectory of my college career. Had I not done the practicum, I am not sure whether or not I would have developed such a passion for computer science.