Leadership: An Intern's Journey
Author: Ann Gallaher
July 2007
With the looming retirement of the baby boomer generation and the potential drain of intellectual capital on the workforce, employers will need to be creative in finding quality workers. A proactive approach is to “grow your own” by hiring and grooming entry level employees.
Chris Hocker was a senior at Miami Valley Career Technology Center and Vandalia Butler High School when he first came to the Greater Dayton IT Alliance in March of 2001. Dean Marker was on loan to the IT Alliance from LexisNexis at the time and recommended that we hire a MVCTC student to help with the some of the admin work that comes with any office environment. Starting with Dean’s mentorship Chris helped set up our first server and hosted e-mail environment. After graduating from MVCTC, Chris began attending Sinclair Community College while continuing to work for us about 20 hours a week.
The next year Allan McLaughlin then CTO and VP for LexisNexis sent Bud Rahe to us to continue the Loaned Executive program. Under Bud’s guidance Chris set up our disaster recovery plan, focused on the security of our computers and server, and declared Computer Information Systems as his major.
When Phil Bergstedt came to us as Loaned Executive Number 3 from Reynolds + Reynolds, he worked with Chris to become proficient in database administration and writing code for our web site. He also assisted Phil with the installation and setup of the D-MIX equipment that began to re-route Internet traffic in the city. Chris transferred to Wright State and declared Computer Science as his major.
John Burkley from NCR was the fourth Loaned Executive to mentor Chris for a short while in 2004 before Chris transferred his interest and knowledge to Reynolds + Reynolds as an intern working under Phil Bergstedt.
On June 9th, Chris graduated from Wright State University after pursuing the degree for six years while working from 20 to 40 hours per week at the same time. He earned a
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the College of Engineering and Computer Science graduating Cum Laude with a GPA of 3.54.
As a celebration and in recognition of Chris’s dedication and hard work, we took the time to ask him about his journey. By the way, every local college has a career services department to help you locate your next intern or grad.
How did you get your first job a Reynolds and what were your responsibilities?
When I came to Reynolds in February of 2004, I was an intern under Phil Bergstedt and a small team of highly skilled engineers and developers that worked for the CTO, Jeffery Almoney. At that time the whole hosted environment offering was just getting underway and I became involved with that effort as it moved from concept into the testing and production phases. It was an exciting time as the blade server technology was relatively new and I was learning so much so quickly. I felt very fortunate to be part of the team as it was a close team who went through some difficult and challenging situations.
What is your current job/title at Reynolds?
I am currently a system administrator on the data center engineering team within The Reynolds and Reynolds company. We are responsible for all the systems hosted at our LexisNexis data centers. My role is in the infrastructure support and deployment area, which manages the installation and configuration of the storage area networks and blade servers within the data centers. I am also involved in the provisioning of new customers and automation of processes to reduce the amount of time required to install, configure, and upgrade existing and new customers.
What is the most interesting project you have gotten to work on?
Working on and seeing the whole hosted environment grow to the point it is today is very rewarding and has been a great experience.
