Last year at work I got our group an intern for the summer and once he started I realized we were having a hard time finding the right projects for him. Generally internships are from 6-8 weeks and a lot of sys admin related work requires root to perform the tasks. With development internships you can just give them a small coding project or some bugs to correct in code and gently introduce them into the environment, with a sys admin position a lot of the tasks and basic routine tickets required root. We ended up taking him out to the datacenter a few times, showing him the cage setup, walked him through the ropes of getting a new server up and running from the cabling into the kickstart. His Linux knowledge was shaky so I spent time with him showing him the ropes of the command line, explaining the permissions of the files,taught him the basics of configuring an IP on a test linux desktop we gave him and installing apache and getting a hello world page. The 6 weeks flew by real fast and I felt bad for not having a well thought out program for him or being able to give him any substantial projects. He was very appreciative of the opportunity even if it was a lot of job shadowing to learn about the job role and high level introductions to things. I'm curious as to how the rest of the group handles sys admin internships and what sort of programs they have laid out for a time frame of 6-8 weeks for someone. Do you give them the keys to the car and shadow them while they are doing tasks? Do they have only access to the staging or development environments where if something goes wrong its not that big of a deal? - Justin Lintz
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