Cisco Internship Experience: Stephanie Wightman

Many people believe that first year students do not get internships because they do not look as hard or they sell themselves short because of their lack of experience. Last year, I ignored these ideas and went to the career fair anyway.

The company representatives I met with were impressed by my initiative in coming to a career fair that mostly juniors and seniors attend, not only because most first years are trying to get adjusted to college and are not thinking about internships, but also because the companies themselves had not started thinking about hiring interns yet.

When it came time for interviews and choosing a company to intern with, I chose Cisco Systems. I had received a scholarship from this company and had gotten to know my boss through this scholarship.

I spent thirteen weeks this past summer in Boulder, Colorado, working with Cisco's Oasis team. There were five other interns in the Boulder branch, three of whom were working on the same project as me. Our project was to migrate the code for Cisco's Adaptive Security Appliances to meet the new Safer C Standards recently approved by the C Standards committee. I would find functions from the old string library and convert the code to accept the new functions from the Safer C library, and then send it to the code owner for review after testing the new code.

One of the problems my team ran into while submitting our code for review was that not everyone was as familiar with the Safer C library as our team was. To fix this, the other interns and I gave a presentation through a conference call-style meeting to departments in other locations. The most fun part of the internship was when we were able to write new functions for the Safer C library.

My experience working for Cisco taught me a lot about myself. When I left school after winter semester, I was terrified that I did not know enough for my job, and was anxiously reading books about programming in C. Now, I have gained confidence in my own abilities that I had refused to acknowledge before. I gained a view of the working world that confirms my decision to be a computer engineer. I would strongly advise all freshmen to attend the career fair and search for an internship. It is an experience that you will never forget, and the knowledge you gain will help you not only in your classes, but will also enrich your life.

Stephanie is a second-year student studying Computer Engineering.

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