A Day in the Life as an Itential Co-Op

The Itential cooperative work program (aka co-op program) is designed to fully immerse college students in a real-life work environment in their chosen field to ensure they are ready for graduation with some tangible work experience. Unlike some internships, where students often find themselves spending more time picking up coffee or “shadowing” than truly engaging in hands on learning, being a co-op means working with Itential as a full-time employee while rotating with traditional academic semesters. This is a truly unique opportunity that I was able to experience as a Georgia Institute of Technology student focused on a computer science major.

After my completing my second rotation, I’d like to share a bit more about my experience.

The Impact of the Itential Co-Op Program

I got involved with Itential starting in the fall of 2020, when I attended Georgia Tech’s virtual career fair. I had heard of Itential prior, specifically because one of my educational threads is computer networking, but I honestly did not know much beyond their specialization in network automation products. During this career fair, I was able to speak one-on-one with an Itential engineer and I learned a lot more about Itential as a company, which seemed like a really great fit based on my desired skillset and their product portfolio. After going through their unique hiring process that winter, I was ecstatic to be offered the opportunity to join the cooperative work experience program. It didn’t take long to notice that as a co-op, you are treated like any other employee at Itential. You are encouraged to contribute in any way you see fit and jump in in areas that align with your interests and area of study.

My first semester with Itential started in January 2021 and continued for the full semester until the following May. While I could talk about my experience getting acquainted with a professional work environment as a student during that semester, something I value and will take with me as I enter the workforce, it was my second semester that really drove home how unique the Itential co-op program experience truly is. That’s the experience I want to focus on.

Real-Life Experience as an Itential Co-Op

After taking classes over the summer, I started back at Itential toward the end of August 2021 — this time more experienced than my first rotation. This semester, I joined the Professional Services Support team, which is the department that, in essence, provides support to the teams that are directly responsible for delivering Itential’s products to our customers. Some of the responsibilities include fixing issues that are critical blockers for other teams, building automation workflows that augment existing products, and performing overall maintenance of the Itential Automation Platform (IAP).

During this rotation I worked to complete three major projects — each crucial to our Professional Services team. The first project I worked on related to the crashing of App Artifacts, an internal tool that is used autonomously by IAP. The root cause of this software crash was a missing workflow from the platform environment, and I was able to successfully patch this, as well as provide additional functionality to App Artifacts to handle errors of this nature more gracefully moving forward.

My second major project involved building a workflow for the device upgrade process for Cisco Nexus devices. Although there was an existing Pre-Built Automation that handled this use case before I started working on it, it was prone to error and somewhat inefficient. As Itential consistently audits their Pre-Built Collection for quality assurance and improvement opportunities, I was tasked with enhancing this Pre-Built as well as providing multiple quality-of-life changes such as backing up the given device before and after the upgrade process.

The final major project I worked on involved building a Pre-Built Automation completely from scratch, which was challenging at first, but ultimately rewarding. This Pre-Built validated the compliance of device versions for all the input devices. While it can be easy to check the version of a given device when there are hundreds or thousands of devices — it can be difficult to check that information. I am proud of the result, which is not only an effective solution, but an efficient one that saves time for Itential’s end user.

Being an Itential Co-Op employee provided me with a lot of personal and professional growth that most students don’t get before graduation. I learned so much this semester because working in a real-world environment put into context many of the ideas and concepts I am learning while acquiring my degree. These realistic lessons have helped me become a much better programmer and computer scientist. I very much look forward to returning to Itential for another rotation in the Summer of 2022 before completing my degree in the winter of that year. It’s also exciting to note that Itential hires a lot of Co-Ops on fulltime after graduation.

Itential prides itself on maintaining a culture of learning. If that sounds like the kind of company culture you’ve been searching for, skip ahead to the careers page and discover your perfect fit.