By: Josh White, DHS Senior Student
In my year of school I have been working at Consolidated Telcom as an intern for the IT branch, who works with programming and wiring. Consolidated is the premier provider for high speed Internet, telephone, and digital television services in southwestern North Dakota.
When I get to the office, I go to put in my time for timesheets and check my emails for anything important. I also check for phishing emails that Consolidated has set up to make sure that the employees don’t click suspicious links or share information that could be stolen from them. After all that I either finish the project I was working on last time or make sure with Nolan Overton (Website Developer), who is the person that supervises me and gives me tasks to complete along with other people. I have been working on many programming projects for Consolidated, this mostly includes making sites. I also help out with wiring, like learning how wiring works for their doors or pulling out old wires or useless wires. This has been a great experience and I have learned so much of programming and wiring from this experience. Everyone in Consolidated has been great and very fun to work with, they are very supportive and funny, everyone there is excellent at their jobs and work well with each other.
The Work-Based Learning (WBL) program has been a great experience and would recommend it to everyone looking to try it. It not only provides experience on the future jobs you are looking into, but it also gives you an idea of what exactly happens in those jobs so that you can decide whether you like the job or not. It also gives you an opportunity to change jobs along the way so if you dislike a job you can change to another job. All in all it is just a great experience and that everyone should do it because you could have the possibility of being hired by your workplace and find what you would like to do in the future.