As the Summer term wraps up and the full-time staff gets ready to say goodbye to our Summer 2019 Interns, CENGN wanted to sit down with some of our students to get their thoughts and opinions on their work placement with us!

This semester, CENGN had a wide range of students with a variety of capabilities join our team from universities across Canada including, Carleton University, Concordia University, Dalhousie University, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria, and Willis College. This team of students joined the company eager to learn and accomplish a lot during their time with us.

As a CENGN student, you get to play a big role in the company’s overall functionality. With this responsibility comes many opportunities to gain hands-on experience, and work with the CENGN team’s technical experts and our commercial-grade infrastructure. Cole Walker, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Student, touched on how his hands-on work with CENGN’s technology was an extremely unique experience that helped drive his future ambitions:

“My work at CENGN has given me the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of cloud infrastructure. This is a difficult area to study independently because it is very complex and certain aspects require a significant amount of computer infrastructure to use. I feel that I have only scratched the surface of this field and I will be pursuing opportunities in the future to learn more about it. CENGN has helped me develop the tools I need to ask better questions and drive my own learning in this area.”

Each and every intern takes part in accelerating the growth of the Canadian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. Each manager, regardless of the department, makes it a priority to give their student meaningful work that will have an impact on the company. This way, students can complete tasks that benefit CENGN’s overall vision and mission, while simultaneously being mentored and learn from their managers and co-workers.

Kyler Manseau, a CENGN Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Student, is a great example of a CENGN employee who has contributed to CENGN’s overall success. Kyler, along with the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Team, was responsible for many technical projects over the course of the semester. He recently completed a segment routing project with IPv6 (SRv6) that has positioned CENGN to be capable of adapting to this technology once it becomes fully developed. Here’s what Kyler had to say about his project:

“The greatest takeaway from working at CENGN has been the work experience I have gained; this includes one of the largest projects I got to work on about segment routing with IPv6 (SRv6). I was able to develop an understanding of this technology that not many other network engineers have ever had the opportunity to work with. It is a new technology that our team believes will grow and be globally adapted into internet core networks in the next few years. With CENGN’s large focus on developing young professionals in Canada, the Engineering team got amazing opportunities to work on technologies and projects we would not have been able to work on anywhere else.”

Interested in hearing more about Kyler? Check out his student spotlight video below!

CENGN strives to offer second-to-none experience and expertise for new hires. We want to train top professionals who can make a difference to any industry or company they decide to join after their time with us, so CENGN gives students the opportunity to not only work with our technical equipment, but also with each of our departments, the growing Canadian businesses we serve, training professionals in the industry, and our globally recognized ecosystems of members and partners. We want to leave students with a sense of purpose and experience that helps shape their future career paths. Siena Testa, CENGN’s Human Resources Specialist Student, talks about how her placement helped her figure out what she may do in the future:

“During my time at CENGN, I have learned more than I ever could of at school about HR practices. Not only has working in Human Resources at CENGN made me consider a future in HR, but I have also had the chance to work alongside other teams at CENGN and get a taste of other departments. Now I have a better idea of the inner workings of Marketing and Finance, which I am now also considering as future careers.”

Although the students have learnt a lot during their time with the company, CENGN has also learnt a lot from the students. It is important for us to continue our student program and place emphasis on the new hires to continue to have a fresh batch of ideas and a variety of skill sets to learn from. We prioritize our student program because they are the future professionals of the Canadian ICT workforce. This contributes to CENGN’s overall goals of strengthening Canada’s network talent pool and solidifying our nation’s global ICT competitiveness.

A special thank you to all our students from this semester who contributed to the company’s success! We can’t wait to keep up with all your future accomplishments.

Interested in becoming a CENGN intern? Check out the available positions below!

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

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