Marcia Elliott's Externship at Principal

2010-07-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

I came out of my last meeting at Principal Financial Group feeling confident that there are going to be great things happening for my students this coming school year. The experiences and insights I have to take with me will help to showcase the opportunities and will help students focus on a career in the IT field. I look forward to continuing the alliance between Central Campus and The Principal Financial Group, and developing ways to bridge education and business.

I have had such a good experience here, and I have learned so much from so many interesting people that I have a hard time with the idea of leaving. I want everyone to know how much I appreciate the time and all of the discussions we have had and I hope to have the opportunity to be here again. It is certainly an understatement, but I truly mean it… Thank you

2010-07-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while my inner child pops up and does the school child "LOOK-IT! LOOK-IT! LOOK-IT! It is JUST like in the movies!!!!!" All of the disaster recovery, plan of action, command center, and people that are around *just in case*, are in place here just like Hollywood said they would be. Working in the virtual world, remote accessing systems and drawing pictures does nothing for seeing the real thing.It is a very impressive disaster recovery setup- I hope they never have to use it.

I am wrapping up my experience here at Principal Financial Group. I gave my final presentation, talked to the managers and discussed how to get students here. There have been so many good ideas discussed that I have a notebook of things to do.

2010-07-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Identity theft is a wide spread problem in our networked world, and it is nice to know that there are companies that are dedicated to keeping information out of the reach of the disturbing elements. I had not thought about information-the actual raw data, as hard as I had on my journeys today. It is a daunting task to keep customers information secure, then to think about who in the world would also have access to it and keep them from seeing what they shouldn't and so on. Sometimes it would involve 3 or 4 levels of "who can see this" that you would never expect. Data protection needs to be one of those subject areas that should be expanded in the curriculum.

2010-07-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

I visited with the ISSS department today and discussed corporate help desk and their responsibilities. There are so many possibilities for students here, we started in planning how we were going to make things happen and what we should be doing. This is a position that a student to get started in, obtain knowledge and get a career going in IT. The ISSS group is dedicated and showed that the first priority was to get the problem solved and get customer working again.

2010-07-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

I was given the opportunity to reconnect with the information security department and review the process for security testing in application development. The scope of knowledge and the abilities of the people involved in this process is amazing to me, it seems that it would be difficult to get ahold of everything that goes into the final product, which is a more secure valid end-user application.

2010-07-21T21:28:00.000-07:00

I had a great discussion with CIO Gary Scholten about the connection between Principal Financial Group and Central Campus. There are many good opportunities to provide interaction between students and employees, and to create bridges between business and education. I am looking forward to all of the conversations this fall and the opportunities that our students will be provided. Stay tuned… more details to follow.

Part of my day was spent with the Functional Architect, which could be explained as the do-er for the Enterprise Architects, who are the thinkers. This is the nuts and bolts of actually getting a change in the network implemented. This position would require an intimate knowledge of every little piece of the network and how it is put together.

2010-07-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

A company the size of Principal Financial Group presents many opportunities for people who reside in the Concrete Sequential personality set. There are policies and procedures for everything that is done; there are even policies and procedures for the way that policies and procedures are written. It is amazing that the documentation is so extensive, but even more impressive that the documentation is always current. After spending time with the Risk Assessment team, I became aware that I do not emphasize documentation enough, even though I had been with many people that had stressed documentation. With the number of people that check and recheck, and then put policies in place, it is assured that everything is done with the company in mind, and more importantly- the customer.

2010-07-19T21:33:00.000-07:00

There are aspects of working for a large corporation that could not possibly be transferred into the classroom, in the technology world, that would be Distributed Storage. I now know much, much more about it than I ever did, and as I went through the day, I began to realize that the people I was with were thinking on a much higher technology level. Simply put, distributed storage is a method of using large data storage devices as logical drives allocated to the needs of individual units. That hardly begins to touch of the complexity of the setup, or even would be considered a decent definition, also- fitting it into the Iowa Core curriculum would require adding a Quadrant Z on to the current A though D. It is big. It is complex. It would be in the top two fields I would want to work in if I was a graduating student.

2010-07-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

I am down to the last week and a half of the externship and I find that I am just now getting to the point that I can do some of the more simple requirements of the job here. There are some interesting non-technical job related things that I have been noticing along the way.

Many of the people that work for Principal Financial Group have been with the company for 10 years or better. They have had the ability to move from one department to another, and are encouraged to do so. Not all of the moves have been within the same area, so the company invests a lot of time in cross-training and education. In looking at the public job boards, there are jobs listed in many different areas, so it is encouraging to know that business is doing better.

If I was a student looking to see what was available in the city of Des Moines for career opportunities, I would be encouraged. I believe that Principal Financial Group offers much in the way of employment and is a great place to work. This provides much in the way of retention of our students in the state of Iowa.

2010-07-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

We had a review of network setup. There are very few people that have the knowledge of this entire network like the presenter did. I was impressed with his ability to explain the various setups. The audience was a mix of different skill levels, in different positions that had a good understanding of a small section of the network.

The afternoon was spent on Firewalls. The diversity of the network does not allow one application to work for everything, so there are many additional parts of the job. Having a good understanding of business needs is a must here.

2010-07-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

I use a domain based antivirus product in my classroom, but have never had any resources to rely on for technical questions. I was grateful to spend time with the antivirus department this morning. We went over some basic set up issues, some of the threats tat have been resented and then go into the bolts of the program. It is a brig job to keep all of these systems up to date and clean, and never ending process that is always on the front line. I should re-emphasize the importance of the position in my class and make sure that students are diligent with their job of keeping the network clean.

2010-07-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

The morning was with the Enterprise Architecture group discussing how this type of field could be taught in a class. It is such a deep process that it would be difficult to put into a high school curriculum. I am going to try, but there is hardly any way I can do it justice. I did not realize how involved the process was.

2010-07-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

I spent the day with the infrastructure group, earning about the end result of a change order. Important shills that the students should have reinforcement about - organization. We traced a cable from a switch to a system, which would have been easy if there hasn't been 1000 cables to look through. Physical assets are hard to keep track of in a company this size, so documentation and more documentation happens.

2010-07-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

Working in a project based enviroment is a fun thing. I have always believed that students work better that way, and it is the way Central Campus has always been, so working for Principal has not been too far out of my comfort zone. I had a meeting with Comfort this morning, and we discussed how project based learning changes the enviroment of a classroom. The big difference is that at Principal, I am not the one planning the projects.

2010-07-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

After learning much in the way of production, I was able to sit down and complete a workflow without too much trouble. Actually, I had a little help, but not that much. I met with update services and with the group that deploys OS to better understand how assets are handled.

2010-07-07T14:27:00.001-07:00

Busy day trying to learn all about encryption, application deployment and mainframes. There was a lot of really good information, and good skills that can be demonstrated in the classroom. I believe that I am going to have to rework curriculum to better include some of the things I have seen today.

2010-07-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

Today was great. I worked with the network security department and I learned all about . One of the most interesting parts of the job was and. I think my students would be interested in , but they would need a better skill set to be competent. I expected that there would be an excessive amount of but I didn’t expect it was this amount. These people really have their job cut out for them, but they do an exceptional job. and mentioned that was one of the best, as well as most secure in the business.

2010-07-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

I joined in a remote router replacement at an office on the west coast. The team leader has a great amount of patience when working over the phone with multiple entities and varied skill levels. Some of the same problems my students and I see in equipment replacement happened in the same way here. I am getting into Voice over IP, with the first meeting being very confusing. So many questions, so many people that I can sit down with and get answers. This is becoming fun.........

2010-07-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

Today was largely discussion about the accountability of networking. There is a good amount of time spent on making sure that history does not repeat itself, and quicker solutions to problems are found. The database of incidences is immense, but it has created good situations for the department. I attended a lunch presentation by Larry D. Zimpleman, CEO, Chairman and President of the Principal Financial Group, with a great message about the direction of the company. I found him to be a very dynamic speaker and very approachable.

2010-06-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

After trying to understand/learn/remember the structure of the department, as well as names, I was able to sit in on a conference meeting that involved some structural changes to the networking at one of the international offices. The first thing that stuck me was the need for our students to learn foreign languages, and have a broader view of the business world. I did feel good about the emphasis that I place on documentation and the need to follow protocol when working within a network.

2010-06-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

First Day!
As soon as the ok is achieved for blogs, then the official postings will begin. For now-things went smooth and I learned some interesting stuff.

2010-06-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

The night before my first day at Principal. It is hard to imagine what is in store, but the biggest hurdle is in front of me and very well may keep me up most of the night. I am going to attempt to go a full day without my truck. Yes, I am going to get on the bus, and find my way downtown for the first time in my life.