- Supported Two-Factor Authentication service for the university (Duo Security).
- Managed team projects including /duo-enrollment for UR Student and the transition from an Access database to Oracle database for IDM Auditing.
- Provided support in the communications campaign for the UR Student Duo Enrollment campaign.
- Supported CyberArk Enterprise Vault Management.
- Provided and updated documentation related to many internal processes.
The University of Rochester offered me a view into a more structured environment. The area I worked in was the “business” side of the university. We didn’t interact with students or faculty. With regards to the medical center side of things, we also didn’t work with doctors, nurses, or patients (generally). We worked to support them all, but in a way that was supporting the services that everyone used in a fairly abstracted way.
There were a few things I really enjoyed about this position. One was the team aspect. Previously, the teams I was a member of were either very small or very specific in what the team members did. In both cases, there were very few people who had overlap and coordinated how things were done and helped each other out. The University of Rochester team is a very supportive team, working together well and sharing responsibilities as needed. When someone was on-call, there was never any question in getting help on it.
With my background and previous way of working, there were a few things that I couldn’t adjust well to. The lack of working with the people who we supported was one of the parts that started to get to me.
However, the part that truly was hard to adjust to was that I historically could do the work that needed to be done whether it was on computer systems, the networking, or any of the other areas that I supported. At the University, when we needed something, we needed to request it from someone else. While I understand the reason for it, it caused me a lot of frustration because I knew how to do many of the things that needed to be done.
The last thing that ultimately led to me leaving the position was that it was very “data heavy”. I was doing more data management and spreadsheet work than I had ever done outside of playing Eve Online and trying to manage in-game team processing. This says a lot when Eve Online is known as “Excel the MMORPG”.
After this position and learning new things about myself, I now had a solid idea of where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do, and I’m moving in that direction as of March 2020.