Career
My first job was working as a cashier at Tropical Smoothie Cafe when I was 16 years old. I worked there for over a year while I was still in high school. When I graduated from high school, I moved to Orlando for college. During this time I hopped around from many different jobs in the food service industry, as well as sales and call center positions. It wasn't until I started taking classes at UCF that I began a Work Study position at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management as an IT technician. While working in this role, I assisted with a variety of tasks and even helped facilitate a campus wide transition to cloud storage. After a few months as a Work Study student, I asked my supervisor to be promoted into an OPS role. So at the start of 2020, I began working my new role as an IT Technician and Digital Media Specialist. This role involved the same tasks as my previous role, but with the addition of working with Faculty and providing technical support for their classes. After three and a half years working at the college I received several certifications such as:
The TestOut IT Fundamentals Pro certification.
Essentials of Webcourses@UCF
Panopto Essentials
Zoom Essentials
Faculty BlendFlex Training courses at UCF
These certifications were fundamental in helping me support faculty and staff at my job.
UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management
Working at Rosen College gave me a great amount of experience in the IT field. I worked with a small team and this allowed me to have more responsibilities and learn a wide variety of IT skills that I would not have learned in a more specialized position. Some of the projects I worked on involved using tools such as the Windows Deployment Tool and even migrating servers at the college.
After I left UCF Rosen College, I started a position as an IT Tech at Rosen Hotels & Resorts, Millennium Technology Group. There are over 13,000 guests and more than 4,500 employees across the hotels and resorts. I provided support to both guests and employees by utilizing the ticketing system Kaseya. Some of my duties involved performing computer software and hardware installations, configurations, and diagnostics. I also utilized system management and configuration tools such as MECM to image computers. In addition, I installed, configured, and diagnosed the InfoGenesis Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems at various hotel locations for staff and event use. Learning how to troubleshoot the POS Systems was particularly interesting to me and a valuable skill to acquire. I also worked on the SALTO Systems electronic locks that Rosen utilizes on their properties.
One of the properties at Rosen Hotels & Resorts, Shingle Creek:
Since starting my career at 16, I have learned a lot about myself over the years. I have discovered my varying strengths and weaknesses through new experiences. The strengths push me forward during hardships, and the weaknesses teach me how to develop even further. I have found that my biggest strength is my ability to solve unexpected problems by adapting to the situation. I realized this strength when I began working my first IT position and shortly after starting I experienced a major shift in responsibility due to the unexpected COVID pandemic. The university I worked at had to completely shift into virtual work and instruction, with everyone relying 100% on our IT department for support during the transition.
I have noticed that my biggest weakness is my desire to work on and fix a situation as soon as it arises. Although admirable when there is free time, this desire to instantly dedicate time to find a solution doesn’t always work out if there are other priorities. I’ve managed to work on this in two ways: focusing and determining the importance of the task and always trying to stay on top of things so that there is potential free time for surprise work.