Sysadmin (System Administrator) understudy interest meetings for students interested in becoming a Sysadmin to learn how Jefferson’s main infrastructure works and the steps it takes to become one were held on Friday, Feb 7 and Wednesday, Feb 12. A final interest meeting was be held on Friday, Feb. 14 in the SysLab.

“We are looking for our next set of Sysadmins,” Sysadmin Cluster Co-Lead and Understudy Coordinator junior Alexander Black said. “Generally it’s sophomore, freshmen, and every once in a while a junior will come in and we will get on board with them. It’s just an ongoing process and part of what makes it special is that you can start out and don’t need to know anything about anything that we do, but we will teach you.”

During the interest meeting on Friday, Feb.7, the Sysadmins talked about what they do to keep the infrastructure at Jefferson by maintaining essential components like ION and servers. 

“So overall, the Sysadmins manage all of TJ’s internal services, including Ion, Director, data management, and various other student servers,” front-end Ion Developer and junior Akash Bhave said.

Students interested in being a Sysadmin do not need prior knowledge in Linux or computer science to try out to become one.

“We’ll teach you. I myself started out using Windows and there’s this correlation between Sysadmins and Linux, which is certainly true as all of our systems run on Linux, but we’ll teach you how to manage,” Black said.

Although most future Sysadmins may be looking for a challenging hobby, many parts of the job can be enjoyable

“It’s fun, it’s kind of therapeutic in a way that it’s kind of half repetitive but it’s also a lot of problem-solving and just learning constantly learning new things because there are so many complexities to a computer that you kind of just keep on discovering new things about it,” Black said.