The summer is coming to an end, and just like that, it’s time for CENGN to say goodbye to its summer 2021 co-op students.

It’s been a busy summer for these ten students. They embraced CENGN’s values and mission to drive innovation in Canada and contributed extensively to the company’s goals, working alongside multiple teams in the organization.

The CENGN Summer 2021 Students

Here’s the complete list of our summer 2021 Co-Op students:

Looking Back at the CENGN Experience

Over the summer, each student set out to learn, develop new skills, and contribute to CENGN’s success. Ranging from supporting commercialization projects to improving CENGN’s internal infrastructure, they did it all. The students worked with multiple members of the company and external stakeholders such as academic partners and Canadian tech start-ups and scale-ups.

Here’s what the students said about their time with CENGN.

Solutions Engineering

The Customer Solutions Engineering (CSE) team saw two returning students – Julia Woodcock and David Toth, but also welcomed one new addition to the team this term, Riya Arora. They integrated quickly into the team to support start-up and scale-up CENGN projects, configuring and customizing cloud environments, providing professional expertise, and reporting project results.

As part of the CSE team for two different terms, Julia highlighted the positive impact of the CENGN workplace on her growth. “CENGN is a highly collaborative workplace where different teams are frequently working together. Being exposed to so many amazing Canadian companies and projects helped me learn about the challenges and applications unique to each one.”

Infrastructure Engineering

The summer was filled with exciting projects for the three Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Students. They got their hands dirty with new tools, taking ownership of projects and improving CENGN’s infrastructure.

During the term, Andrew Moore worked on two key projects. The first was optimizing CENGN’s use of NetBox – an infrastructure resource modeling (IRM) application designed to empower network automation.

Additionally, Andrew leveraged JumpCloud – a cloud directory service to securely manage users’ identity, devices, and access – to serve as a single sign-on (SSO) option to log in to NetBox. This reduces password fatigue and offers a more secure and optimized experience for users.

“My time at CENGN introduced me to an array of new tools and technologies, and perhaps the most important skill I acquired was “learning how to learn” outside an academic environment, embracing the challenges that come with it,” Andrew highlighted about his time at CENGN.

On the other hand, Ramy Mohamed worked on integrating Tehama’s Desktop as a Service (DaaS) to CENGN’s cloud. This project can potentially lead to virtual desktops instead of laptop shipping for employees.

Ramy states that he enjoyed his time at CENGN, working on projects using the latest cloud technologies and gaining valuable experience under his belt. In addition to work experience, Ramy also took advantage of CENGN Academy courses to improve his knowledge. “During the internship, I earned the CENGN Infrastructure as Code digital badge, my second badge from CENGN!”

Interested in earning a CENGN badge and advancing your skills in open-source cloud and networking technologies?  Browse CENGN Academy’s courses.

Like Andrew, Israel Aritotuomah also worked closely with JumpCloud to implement SSO into Observe – a data platform for shaping and relating data for troubleshooting, security, and customer support. Furthermore, Israel worked closely with the training operations team on updating the training API with new image and deployment.

“At CENGN, I learned a lot from doing research and troubleshooting. I worked with exciting projects that I hadn’t experienced before which I’m looking forward to building on in the next term,” said Israel as he prepares to return in the fall.

Training Operations

CENGN’s professional training program, CENGN Academy, made significant strides in the past year, introducing new courses and features for students across Canada. In the summer, the Training Operations team took on Aaron Buitenwerf, which contributed immensely to the program’s optimization and future success.

Aaron dedicated his time to producing an executive dashboard with statistical information on training operations and developed an automated learning deployment with Auto Academy Pipeline. The latter was the highlight for the Training Operations team.

Highly praised, Aaron worked closely with the team to fully automate the process of enrolling numerous learners in CENGN Academy courses instead of relying on a multi-step, manual process that was not scalable and prone to human error. The new approach takes five to ten minutes to complete the task, which before took up to four hours to complete.

Aaron is thankful for the opportunity to work at CENGN and to take a deep dive on cloud computing and learn new skills to leverage in his future career. “One of the best parts was the level of trust I was given and the ability to start a project from scratch seeing it through the end. It allowed me to really make an impact on the Training Team and the company.”

Marketing

On the business side, the summer was a busy couple of months too. The marketing students, Emilia and Estevão, had their hands full with the preparation of important upcoming events such as the 6^th annual CENGN Summit and CENGN’s Annual Report for the Fiscal Year 2021.

Additionally, the team continuously worked with start-ups and scale-ups to promote recently completed CENGN projects, hosted and participated in tech events across Canada, and developed content for the Canadian tech community and the public.

“The amount of responsibility and autonomy the team entrusts you with is empowering. With every project, you feel a genuine sense of ownership. Combined with the marketing skills I learned and improved, the experience was very positive,” said Estevão. He was grateful for the opportunity to develop his skills in content writing, social media marketing and work on a variety of tasks.

Likewise, Emilia saw significant growth as a marketing professional. Emilia noted, “Working at CENGN allowed me to put in practice concepts and theory I learned in school. I had the chance to be involved in meaningful projects and learn from qualified professionals.”

Human Resources

After eight months with CENGN, Human Resources Specialist Student Fuhui Ying is thankful for the opportunity to be part of such a welcoming organization.

“CENGN’s collaborative work environment, friendly team members, and self-learning resources greatly benefitted my self-development in the past eight months. This internship familiarized me with real-life HR applications, and the high sense of responsibility and positive work attitude I learned will stay with me moving forward,” stated Fuhui.

The Road Ahead

Throughout the summer, each student had the opportunity to work and connect with industry experts and gain relevant work experience that will help them fast-track their careers and be prepared for future employment opportunities.

CENGN is proud to contribute to the growth of Canada’s next generational talent. Students at CENGN are seen as an integral part of the team. We rely on the students to do real work that impacts innovation and growth in Canada.

As everyone at CENGN bids farewell to our summer students, we look forward to welcoming our next cohort of students in the fall ready to learn new skills, develop, and make an impact on Canada’s innovation economy.

Thinking of joining CENGN as a student?

About the Author

• 

Estevão Costa is the Content Writer Student at CENGN (Summer 2021) and a Marketing student at the University of Ottawa. His major interests lie in transforming complex, technical subjects into intelligible and enjoyable content through simple and engaging writing. Aside from his daily marketing activities, Estevão has been a Teaching Assistant at the University of Ottawa for two years for multiple business courses.

More by Estevao Costa