Life at GÉANT is the initiative offering a closer look at the people inside GÉANT’s organisation and what excites them about their working lives. Callum Storey, Operations Centre Network Engineer Intern at GÉANT’s Cambridge offices shares his experience with us.
“Every single day I learn something new”
What is your role at GÉANT?
In June 2020 I started an internship at GÉANT as an Operations Centre Network Engineer, that will last until the end of February 2021. I joined the NOC team led by Tony Barber and I report to him.
A simplified version of our day to day job is that we usually deal with direct contacts with NRENs or with providers (e.g. Lumen Technologies and such), trying to get to the root of possible network issues, and then of course we are also involved in a variety of side projects. In fact, I am currently working on a project involving the way network services are imported into an inventory and services database from Juniper routers.
Every time we get a notification from a router saying something went down along the GÉANT Network, we look into the relevant router and take some time to pull out the information we need: Is it an optical network or an optics problem? Is it currently working? What time did it go down and what time did it go back up? Sometimes it feels like investigating work, which is nice and interesting.
Why GÉANT and what have you been enjoying most since you joined?
During my university studies I understood that a career in programming wasn’t really my thing, but I got interested in Networking, so I moved into that area of Computer Information studies. Of course, GÉANT immediately caught my eye because of multiple factors: it’s THE pan-European data network for the research and education community and a very large network provider in Europe overall. Furthermore, GÉANT’s early adoption of IPv6 got my attention and fascinated me.
Despite joining recently, working at GÉANT has already been a huge experience for me. It is a very welcoming environment and it’s very easy to integrate in the team. The influx of information I receive is amazing: every single day I learn something new and I don’t think I’ll ever get to the point when I know everything.
About Callum
Callum comes from Mildenhall in Suffolk, UK and he is currently studying at the Computing and Information Science faculty of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. His passion in Computing lies within networking.
Outside of work he enjoyed meeting with colleagues from university (before Covid-19 lockdowns were issued all over the world in 2020) and he is an avid computer enthusiast. He spends his time building, diagnosing and playing on computers.
Are you looking for an industry placement as part of your University degree to develop your IT career in an exciting, fast paced and rapidly growing industry? We are offering a 12-month placement within our Operations Centre for those undertaking a placement year (starting July 2021) as part of their University degree in a Computing Science or Networking.
Learn directly from GÉANT employees what it means to work for a unique organisation that plays a pivotal role for research and education world-wide: Read other Life at GÉANT stories.
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