Profile

My job involves solving technical telecommunications problems. Many times this involves opening up trouble tickets with the carriers or working with vendors to solve problems.

In addition to resolving technical problems. I also develop and configure call flows, configure T1 lines, and configure traffic for 800 number routing into a facility. I also am responsible for the daily administration of doing moves/adds/changes to the system and providing training to end users on the various components of a system I.E. Running Call Reports, etc.

Majority of the time, I work near the server room in an office building. I spend most of my time in my cube working on the various systems that it takes to do my job. On occasion, I will work from the server room when servers go down or are having problems.

I work with people with various backgrounds, mostly technical people. I.E. Database Administrators, Network Engineers, Reporting Experts, etc.

I arrive at work by 8:30 AM and log on to my machine. I will first check email and then I will check our ticketing systems to see if any urgent tickets have been opened. If so, I will start working on urgent tickets immediately. If there aren’t any urgent tickets then I will look at the various projects that I am working on and start working on those tasks. They range from building new call flows to testing of hardware.

Communication, Troubleshooting Skills, Being able to work with a team. Resilience, Vendor Management, Knowledge of protocols

I work 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM with about one late night a month which is used for maintenance on the servers. Maintenance windows allow for us to install patches or to work on items that we typically cannot do during normal business hours. This time frame is usually set by the company, at my current company we do maintenance at 8 PM.

There also are occasional priority tickets that need to be dealt with immediately, so it is not uncommon to be paged or called if issues arise.

It depends on the companies infrastructure set up but I very rarely travel.

I love that not every day is the same. I never know what type of problems might creep up. I also enjoy the planning pieces of what it takes to get a system(s) up and running. This usually involves working as a team to accomplish the same goal.

Sometimes the job can be too technical and there are days in which I don’t want to deal with technical aspects. I have also had some problems that take months to figure out.

Seeing the movement that women are making in the job market.

A college professor.

The best advice I ever received was from one of my college professor’s. I was told that I could never do harm to a computer, the only way to truly break it was to throw it out the window. Around the time that I was set to graduate I was nervous about not getting a job but was also told that it takes more than technical knowledge to get a job.

I recommend getting as involved in high school and college as you can. I had many more opportunities that opened for me because I was involved, by my involvement in college, it lead me to receive scholarships, attend leadership retreats and become a much more outgoing person.

I would have taken my time getting into my career. I was very anxious to find a job and because of it there were other interests in which I didn’t pursue.

In my spare time I like to relax and hang out with friends and family. I enjoy shopping and art. I also like to get out and do various activities in my town, festivals, etc.

While in college I did an internship which I feel was the start to my career. It was the first time I had ever worked in the industry and I took advantage of as much as I could.

I have always been interested in gadgets and how they work. I found myself thinking it would be cool to configure machines and understand how they work.

The most important one I feel is being a women in a male dominated industry.