{"id":12331,"date":"2018-11-26T05:05:13","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T15:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/workable-level.flywheelsites.com\/?p=12331"},"modified":"2018-11-25T20:54:32","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T06:54:32","slug":"ask-a-professor-information-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/2018\/11\/26\/ask-a-professor-information-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask a Professor: Information Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Katlin Cilliers<\/a> | Staff Writer<\/h5>\n

Ask a Professor is a regular feature in which\u00a0Kapi\u02bbo News will highlight the real-life careers and jobs that stem from areas of study at Kapi\u02bbolani Community College.<\/em><\/p>\n

Professor Hal Corcoran has worked in the field of Information Technology\u00a0\u2013 IT \u2013 since 1995. He obtained most of his professional experiences on the East Coast\u00a0where he got a job fresh out of college with the University of Rhode Island, where he graduated with his bachelor’s and master\u2019s degree. The KCC professor explained that Information Technology is intertwined in virtually every industry nowadays, which requires from its professionals a zest for adapting and learning new technologies.<\/p>\n

Corcoran currently teaches Networking and Cyber Security at KCC, where he\u2019s worked since 2008. He shared some of the ins and outs of his experiences in the IT field as a help desk, network and server administrator.<\/p>\n

What did you do in help desk?<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the help desk I was the Macintosh [guy]. Help desk was anything that came through the door. People would call, and come in with a problem, like \u2018I\u2019m having a problem with my mac\u2019 or they could come in and say \u2018How do I do this?\u2019 or \u2018How do I do that?\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u2026 So, it was a great learning experience. I recommend to my students, you know? …\u00a0[It] might not be the most fun job, because, you know, it\u2019s always new things coming at you, so it can be a little stressful. But it\u2019s such a great learning experience, because you have to deal with all different kinds of problems, you never know what it\u2019s going to be from one day to the next.<\/p>\n

What was a typical day in help desk?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d sit in my office, and people would either call or come to my office \u2026 we had help desk hours. And it could be anything from \u2018How\u00a0do I build a website on mac?\u2019 to \u2018I\u2019m getting this error on my mac.\u2019 … But it\u2019s such a great learning experience, because you have to deal with all different kinds of problems, you never know what it\u2019s going to be from one day to the next.<\/p>\n

What did you do as a server administrator?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I got hired to manage the main web servers and email servers for the University [of Rhode Island.]\u00a0I did that for nine\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0years. And that was, day in and day out writing programs on the servers. Also, checking logs and monitoring the servers to make sure they were operating correctly, you might get calls from the help desk, if someone\u2019s having a problem, say, with their email and those people weren\u2019t able to solve it, they\u2019d call me as the \u2018email server administrator,\u2019\u00a0see if I could help.<\/p>\n

What happened after those nine years?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I decided that I wanted to move to Hawai\u02bbi, so I started to apply for positions here and I had interviews \u2026 [Eventually] I got hired as a network administrator for Honolulu Community College [as a] Network and Unix Administrator. And so, I worked there for three years, from like 2006 to 2009. So that was on networking, which I liked because I got out around the campus a lot, \u2026 I was going to the switches and routers were installed, and the network closets in the different buildings, and you get to meet different people;\u00a0you\u2019re just moving around campus, you\u2019re not just kind of sitting in one place and doing programming on your computer.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the difference between a server administrator and a network manager?<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, a network manager is managing the switches and the routers and the wiring that create the network, and the WiFi access point, and kind of the \u2026 infrastructure that create the network. The server administrator is managing the specific servers, so like the web servers, the e-mail servers that sit on the network.<\/p>\n

The network is a lower-level infrastructure that the servers use to communicate with each other and to communicate around the internet. It\u2019s just a different level of infrastructure. Probably from a non-IT standpoint, it looks like the same thing, but it\u2019s really you know, a little bit \u2026 it\u2019s a different area and quite as different expertise and skills.<\/p>\n

How does that work in practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the network admin, I was configuring switches, configuring routers, and those are \u2026 you have to go out to where they\u2019re located. Every building has a work closet where those devices are located, and you have to physically go \u2026 you have to plug in with the special type of cable to your laptop and you can do configurations on it.<\/p>\n

As far as configuring a server, you just sit in your office, you connect to the server from your computer, and you do the configurations that way. The network is more localized. You have to go out to the location, whereas the server is more \u2026 you don\u2019t have to actually go to the server, you do most things remotely.<\/p>\n

What does the job market look like in terms of salaries and trending fields? <\/strong><\/p>\n

So, almost any industry that you think of now has some IT people that are helping to support it. So, when you go into IT you don\u2019t necessarily have to go, you know, into an IT company, right? You could be working for a company that makes donuts or something. But they would have an IT person who manages their network or [the] software\u00a0that they use to keep track of customers. IT is almost everywhere now, it\u2019s ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

Yeah, so, our focus here in this program has always been supporting small businesses, and we think that that requires more of a generalist, more of a broad knowledge, someone who can do a lot of things, who can learn new technologies as they come along, because in IT everything you learn is essentially obsolete when you graduate because it changes so fast.<\/p>\n

So, two years, you know you\u2019re using some completely different type of, or at least different versions of the same programs, because things are moving so fast. So what we\u2019re really trying to focus on is to give people the foundations and the backbone where people can kind of learn technology so they can learn new technologies.<\/p>\n

What can students expect from both working in smaller, non-tech companies and IT companies\u2019 salaries?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s hot right now is cybersecurity. Everyone\u2019s hiring people with a background in cybersecurity. It\u2019s very hot. And I\u2019ve heard anecdotal reports of students graduating and being hired for six figures. The really star students. But, you know, that might be the exception.<\/p>\n

As far as entry-level positions \u2026 you might end up with Super Geeks or Geek Squad; I\u2019m not really sure what they pay, but it\u2019s certainly much less than that, probably going by 40k range, maybe 30 or 40k range. It\u2019s kind of a help desk thing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a wide, wide range of salaries, and I guess in the hot areas you tend to get the higher salaries, but even in the other areas, that\u2019s [an] entry level, you know, very little or no experience. And just building a few years of experience, those salaries go up quite sharply. If you specialize in certain areas, if you specialize in programming or networking, once you\u2019re more specialized then you can usually commend a higher salary as well.<\/p>\n

Would you say that salary-wise, it\u2019s better to focus on exclusively IT, tech companies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s different to different people. It depends on what their interest is. …\u00a0We\u2019ve had some people, we\u2019ve had some students who are actually accountants, they start in accounting, but they want to be able to support the technologies and whatever they go through, so they come to IT classes and they think that gives them a strong, it makes them stronger candidates. … Now, because IT is just so blended into everything, there\u2019s a lot of overlapping, you know? Maybe I have IT skills, but it also combines some other specialized skills for some industr[ies].<\/p>\n

What are the best and worst aspects of your job?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have to say that they\u2019re both the same thing: dealing with the customers. Dealing with the people, some people \u2026 it can be very rewarding when you help a person, solve a technical problem and they\u2019re very happy and thankful. On the other hand, people \u2026 sometimes we interact with people when they\u2019re very frustrated, they\u2019re having problems with their computer, so they\u2019re very frustrated and they can be difficult to deal with, though.<\/p>\n

Technology is always the same. The same command produces the same output on the computer all the time. So, that\u2019s, you know, that\u2019s easy to deal with. At least for me \u2026 it\u2019s always dealing with the personalities, the customers that was both the best and the worst.<\/p>\n

What profile would thrive following a career in IT?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It could be a wide range. We have \u2026 you can be one of those people, just 3 o\u2019clock in the morning programming in the darkroom by themselves and not really dealing with people, and up to you know, someone who \u2026 [works in] help desk who\u2019s dealing with people face-to-face. So, there\u2019s a wide range of opportunities for different personality types in IT.<\/p>\n

What would you say to a student who wishes to pursue a career in IT but is not quite sure yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would tell them to try a few classes. I was not an IT major initially, until I took my first IT class and I fell in love with it and switched to it. \u2026 So, I\u2019d say try and see if that\u2019s something that you\u2019re happy doing or not. We have a few different areas, so I\u2019d say try different areas, we have different classes in database, programming, and networking\/help desk and cybersecurity. And some students like to specialize in one of those areas, and some like to kind of be the jack of all trades and learn about all of them.<\/p>\n

[To read previous Ask a Professor features, click here<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Katlin Cilliers | Staff Writer Ask a Professor is a regular feature in which\u00a0Kapi\u02bbo News will highlight the real-life careers and jobs that stem from areas of study at Kapi\u02bbolani Community College. Professor Hal Corcoran has worked in the field of Information Technology\u00a0\u2013 IT \u2013 since 1995. He obtained most of his professional experiences […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":12358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campusfeatures","category-features","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}