Western State College of Colorado

I worked at Innovative Technology Systems, Inc., a leading provider of information technology services and integration solutions for mission-critical Intelligence and U.S. Government programs.

I worked as a Software and Database Engineer. I helped design and program a large majority of the current internal and external corporate web pages. I reorganized and added new capabilities to some of the company databases and developed an inventory database. I worked extensively in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and SQL.

I finished my internship and graduated from Western in August. ITS immediately offered me a permanent job as a Software Engineer, which I accepted. I'm getting a Top Secret Security Clearance to begin work on Defense Department projects.

In the future I'll go back to school for my Masters degree, providing more opportunity for growth in the Defense Industry.

I had an internship with CIGNA Healthcare Systems in Hartford, CT. My internship was with the Technology Early Career Development Program within CIGNA. CIGNA is one of the Fortune 50 companies and deals in private and corporate healthcare.

My hired position was as a Systems Analyst, but early on, I received a project that I worked on alone as an Application Developer. I designed and wrote an online customer satisfaction survey based on an already existing hard copy. I wrote the online application in ASP.NET.

At CIGNA, I also had the opportunity to network with other Information Technology employees, as well as other Computer Science students from other colleges.

I have just accepted another internship, this time with Gunnison County doing network design. I'll be reconfiguring networks using Linux and Windows NT, enabling remote administration and monitoring, deployment and test planning, and finally documenting the design and implementation.

I interned with Konica Minolta Systems, Inc. I worked at the Core Systems Laboratory in Boulder, CO for their Quality Engineering department.

The Systems Laboratory writes core code for their printer driver. This core print driver is used in all models of Konica Minolta's printers, from their desktop printers to their large business scale copier/printers.

My responsibility for the summer was to redesign and rewrite an old piece of testing software. The basic function of this testing software is to compare benchmarked printer output to simulated printer output. The original program has some fundamental problems. It was quite slow, difficult to maintain, difficult to change benchmarked output, and tedious to add new sets of benchmarked output.

In my design I addressed the issues of maintenance and combined changing and adding new sets of benchmarks into the same simple procedure. As for the speed of the program, this issue was taken care of by using a much simpler and straight forward design.

Overall my internship experience was extremely positive. I learned not only good design practice but made valuable contacts in the industry.

Tristan graduated from Western is now in the graduate graduate at the University of Colorado, working on a Masters in Computer Science.

I had an interned in Frisco, Colorado with Real Fast Inc., a software company that has marketed a product for filling out real estate forms. The original software was written in C++ using the Microsoft Foundation Class and a contracted company, Avantia, out of Cleveland Ohio, is developing a new web based version.

I worked with a team testing the software against requirements documents from the analysis process. We used an online program called Bugzilla to document bugs and communicate with the development team.

During the last three weeks of my internship I worked on a bug in the existing product. Code had to be changed to insert a graphic in certain forms. The fix to have the graphic appear was not difficult but that fix brought about the difficult problem of alignment of the document. I had to track code through three different modules of the program to find all aspect of the document alignment. By the end of my internship I had fixed the problem and later was excited to hear that customers were using the enhanced program.

Note: Phil is now doing software development in New Zealand.

What I am doing is adding onto the functionality of the Computer Science and Math Department's wiki page where by students can write-in programs that make use of the Haskell compiler to make music. Thus far I have been working on allowing the user to enter a program within the wiki editor to be sent to a script that I have written. This script will places the provided text within a XML format where I will then hand it off to a program written by Professor Peterson which checks it for errors. The output will then be handed back to me (again in XML format). I parse it and display it with the proper format. I am also working on an interactive keyboard where the user can press a key on the keyboard in order to generate the desired musical notes. This is being written in JavaScript while the others scripts I am writting in PHP. More info is available here.