While the technology bust has left thousands of highly skilled people looking for work and even considering a career change, the lure of a career in IT hasn’t completely evaporated. For a fortunate few IT interns each year, the Berkeley Lab offers an opportunity to work in a computing environment that offers a little bit of everything in the way of technology innovation.

The Information Technologies and Services Division (ITSD) Spring Intern program places students from East Bay community colleges in groups where they work 20 hours per week while they are full-time students. Most of the students are recruited from local colleges, such as the College of Alameda, Diablo Valley College, and Contra Costa Community College. This diverse and talented group will help out with projects ranging from network design to hardware repair to building Linux clusters for scientific applications.

Charlie Verboom, Manager, Desktop Support, is one of the administrators of the program and helps choose the students each year.

”The reason why we specifically recruit from local schools is because the communities which are served by these schools also reflect the communities where Berkeley Lab has the greatest impact, and we have an obligation to reach out and help whenever possible,” said Verboom.

For some of the new recruits, the Lab represents one of their first jobs in IT. For others, it’s a first or second step in a career transition to the IT field. And for all of them, the Lab represents a demanding computing and networking environment that is an ideal place to hone their skills.

“I just woke up one day and decided I wanted to go back to school,” said Shawn March, a former sergeant in the Marine Corps and research technician at Chevron Chemical. “Computers were more of a hobby up until that point. I liked to collect machines at Chevron and tear them apart, hook them together, just to see how things work.”

March received his A+ certification in hardware and software from Laney College, and is currently enrolled in a Cisco certification program at Alameda College. At the Lab, he is diagnosing hardware problems, installing software, setting up accounts, and learning about networking issues. In addition to school and Lab work, March has been a volunteer at the Henry Robinson homeless shelter in Oakland for the last few years, where he helps people with computer basics, such as Internet connections and software installation. “There are a lot of things I don’t know yet, and sometimes I feel like a fifth wheel. But every day is a new adventure here, I like that a lot.”

Robbye Walker also got her start in IT work as a volunteer. In the 1980’s she lived in Milwaukee, raising six kids in an environment where gangs were an ever-present and disturbing reality. Wanting to be closer to her kids and their daily lives, she volunteered to work at the local high school, where the only position available was overseeing an in-school suspension program. Before long, she transformed the program into a computer learning center, where she was able to teach herself and the kids some basic computing skills. Worried about her own kids' survival, though, she picked up and moved to rural Oklahoma, where her family has roots and her kids could focus on school.

“I was down in this little country town, fiddling around with computers, and there was nowhere to get a job,” she explained. “So eventually I raised money for local technology projects and became a self-trained engineer.”

After seeing all of her kids through college, Walker decided to move to California to help out an aging relative and continue her IT track via classes at Alameda College, where she learned of the Lab’s intern program. Thus far, she’s been working on account sign-up and maintenance, and is looking forward to cultivating her networking skills.

However, IT work is but one of her career tracks.

“I’m actually a jazz singer, that’s my passion,” she said. “It is new and exciting for me, and I’ve just finished my first demo.” Eventually, she’d like to set up shop in Las Vegas and sing there and in Europe, and wherever else the notes lead her. But for now, you can find her at Kelly’s bar in Alameda, where Wednesday and Sunday nights are open jazz sessions. “And don’t forget your axe,” she says.

With 20 years of experience as a sales engineer in the chemical industry, Steve Gelb thought his career track was secure. But when the industry shifted from the Bay Area to the Southeast, Gelb had to start looking in new directions.

“You try to narrow down what you’re good at and what you like,” he explained. “I like figuring things out, and CS is a lot of figuring things out. I do a lot of work around the house, and CS is similar, whether it’s tearing down a chimney and building it back up, or figuring out a software program.”

After getting his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Cal State Hayward, Gelb took how-to courses in Oracle, Linux, and other entry-level courses that ranged from networking to hardware and web design. He also works for the Oakland Unified School District, where he provides desktop, LAN, and Internet support.

At the Lab, he already has a long list of things to do, and one of his primary projects is creating a new application for viewing networked printers. Using Novell’s iPrint application, Gelb is trying to expand the program to display a visual map.

Rounding out this year’s group of interns are Jennifer Dy and Sieu Luu, both of whom are recent college graduates mapping their first career path.

Dy has a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and Luu has a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in electrical engineering. Despite these hard-earned degrees in specialized areas, both of them are attracted to IT work and are using the Lab as a testbed for their skills.

“After I graduated, I decided to try something else other than architecture, so I changed my field to web development,” Dy said. “I like this better because in architecture you can’t really design your own designs, you have to follow too many things. In web design, you can promo your project to the client, and it gives you more freedom to work on your creative skills.”

Dy has earned certificates of completion in web design and digital imaging at Diablo Valley College, which helped her with design and computer graphic skills. At the Lab, she will be focusing on Web design and development, with an emphasis on scripting languages such as javascript.

With his engineering background, Sieu Luu considers himself mostly a “hardware guy” but has taken classes to cultivate his programming and networking skills as well.

Over the last few years, he worked as an application engineer with Teradyne Inc. and used his programming skills in C and Java to write and test software applications. He is currently learning Linux, and will be helping the Scientific Cluster Support group at the Lab.

“In school, I learned the basic concepts of setting things up. Here, I want to get more hands-on experience and figure out how to configure things, like web servers,” he said. “I also want to work on the scientific clusters. I’m not too familiar with clusters, but am excited about learning.”