The Student Systems Administrator Understudy program will begin to train future student Sysadmins. On Wednesday, Feb. 3 and Friday, Feb. 5, Jefferson’s current Sysadmins hosted interest meetings for potential understudies. Every school year, before Spring Break, interest meetings are held to inform underclassmen about the Sysadmin program.

“The Understudy program is the Sysadmins’ way to find new Sysadmins to manage the intranet. It’s essentially a recruiting system,” Understudy Coordinator and senior Alexander Black said.

Furthermore, the Understudy program acts as a part of the application process to be accepted into the full Sysadmin program. To participate in the Understudy program, students are not required to have any prior experience. What the Sysadmins value most are students who are enthusiastic and ready to learn.

“This year, we’re looking for five students to replace the 2021 Sysadmins that are leaving,” Black said. “The Understudy [program] is its own part of the application, but it’s not official until later in the year. We’ll look at what every student has done– we figure out if they are a good fit, if they are interested in system administration, and if they are willing to be committed to the program whether it be from routine maintenance work to if Ion goes down. So, there’s a good mix of it.”

The Understudy process includes not lectures but rather firsthand experience such as shadowing current Sysadmins. Not only can prospective understudies gain a better understanding of the Sysadmin program, but they can also gain insight on knowledge that only their mentors know from experience such as developing software, managing hardware, patching issues, and much more.

“The process starts off with the interest meetings that we run. We had a big presentation there with everything about what we do and things we work on. From there, once we get everything situated, we start to have students shadow the Sysadmins. We might have two or three students be with a Sysadmin, watching them work,” Black said. “Eventually, we want all the students to get a lot of experience working with Linux and other systems that we have.”

However, due to this school year’s virtual learning environment, the team of Sysadmins had to adjust their Understudy program. By integrating projects into the 2020-2021 Understudy program’s structure, the Sysadmins hope to provide an abundant experience for this year’s batch of applicants.

“For this year, I like that it’s more focused on projects. We are having actual set goals. When I was learning, it would mostly be me watching the current Sysadmins of the day doing their work and trying to fix something and writing down some of the things that they did. In one way, it’s a lot more guidance. I think in the end it’s going to create better Sysadmins right off the gate,” Black said. “We are going to have people do projects related to the actual work that we do. I do a lot of work with the clusters, so I might say to them, ‘Set this up’ or ‘Do this.’”

On the other hand, many complications and inconveniences arise from directing the Understudy program online. Because of quarantine restrictions, various unique learning opportunities are omitted. For instance, understudies are unable to explore the server rooms that contain computing clusters or the Computer System Lab classrooms that contain workstations.

“Importantly, when we’re in-person, the type of stuff that we do includes physical work with the cluster. It includes going into the server room and physically working with the machines. That is one thing that we can’t do simply because we’re miles away from the building,” Black said. “With the Understudy program, when we’re shadowing in-person, we expect understudies to follow us and look at what we do. We’ll explain things here and there to them to engage their interest; we can’t exactly do that now. Our solution is to have them do projects, but that is an imperfect solution because it’s very different than actually being in the room and working with the systems.”
Moreover, any Jefferson student can apply as an Understudy. Contrary to what some students believe, there are no technical skills required to be an Understudy– only a strong willingness to learn.

“Naturally, it’s going to attract a lot of Computer Science folks, but the thing that we’re really looking for are students that are interested in doing this type of work. We have a lot of Sysadmins that come in and don’t know what Linux is. A lot of people in the Understudy [program] will find out that they’re not interested in maintaining the systems in an IT fashion, but others will,” Black said.

Furthermore, many Jefferson students are fascinated by the work done by the Sysadmins and are interested in peering behind the curtains of the Computer Systems Lab’s infrastructure.

“During the presentation, I could see the Sysadmins interacting, and you could tell that they were really good friends. It was also very interesting to listen to them explain how they solved problems,” freshman Kedar Prasad said. “This is something that I like to do– coding computers and managing servers. So, it’s great to see that TJ offers something like that.”