SRC - IT Dept

Southern Regional College is the largest Further and Higher Education College outside of Belfast in Northern Ireland. With a total of six campuses across the counties of Armagh and Down and covering four district councils, the College offers first class education and an exciting learning environment for further and higher education.  At Southern Regional College we pride ourselves on being able to offer students a diverse range of Higher Education learning experiences. .We are an award winning College, a centre of Excellence for teaching and learning and can offer students an intellectually and socially stimulating environment. We hope we can welcome you to the Southern Regional College in the not too distant future.

Student: Alan Clarke
This is what Alan thought of his Internship:

Hi my name is Alan Clarke and I am in the third year of a computing course at Southern Regional College. During my time at Southern Regional College I became aware of a program that can help students reach their full potential, the program is called Career Academy. The Career Academy scheme was designed to help students exceed in the world of business, their motto is aspire, accelerate and achieve.In 2011 I joined Career Academy and one of their criteria is to put you into an internship for six weeks, so I went somewhere that would benefit me as a computing student. I joined up with the IT technicians at Southern Regional College and here is what I did. The first few days were to get to know each one of the technicians and understand their role. There are five technicians in the IT department and they each have a particular role, my role was to shadow these technicians so I could get an understanding of what they do.During my time with these technicians I picked up many new tricks that would be able to benefit me during my computing course. During the six weeks there were days were I got really bored, this was because it was the end of term and their wasn’t that much happening that’s not to say I didn’t do or learn anything.  The first thing that I needed to understand was the help desk which is a program that helps the technicians allocate certain jobs to a particular technician. The technician with the most expertise on a certain subject would get allocated a certain job.



When I followed the technicians there were certain things that I got to do, such as changing the cartridges on various types of printers.  It was the end of the year so the team had a lot of equipment checks.  We examined dozens of rooms checking various IT related equipment.  They also allocated a PC refresh on many rooms so I got rid of alot of computers and allocate various new ones to different rooms.  On my last few days I followed a couple of technicians around while they were checking all of the rooms to see if all of the equipment was working.  We checked all of the software to see if different rooms needed different software.The six weeks was a great experience and I have really enjoyed it. I would recommend this experience for anyone. My advice to people would be to really go for it when they get on the internship you have to ask a lot of questions be really confident and just work hard to get the most out of the six weeks.