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What do you want to do professionally in 1 year?

In 1 year I will still be enrolled in college at UNC. Although, I will continue my own side projects on the side such as UNC Class Checker (classchecker.com), UNC Class Finder (uncclassfinder.com), and others that are in their infancy.

What do you want to do professionally in 5 years?

I would like to work for a tech company that provides me the freedom to take on projects as my interests grow and change. (I've found that Cisco is particularly lenient in this regard, as I have changed and taken on different projects even as an intern.)

Please provide comments about experience with your manager (your comments will not be shared with your manager):

I wasn't very excited about the project that my manager set me up with. So, with his permission, I decided try out other projects that Advanced Services was working on. My manager was very accepting of this and encouraged me to pursue work that I enjoyed. As a result, for the majority of the summer, I ended up working closely with Hazim Dahir (hdahir) in place of my manager, Matt Birkner (mbirkner). For the work that I did do for Matt, my experience with was adequate but not great. It was difficult at times to understand exactly what he wanted, what the end goal of the project was, and why what I was doing was important or exciting. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to change the direction of my work. The work that Hazim put me on was much more fitting and working with him was absolutely fantastic. He was responsive, clear, and gave a lot of freedom and feedback. He explained exactly what I was to do and explained why it was important. The beginning of the internship was frustrating at times because most of the interns' managers went to Cisco Live, and thus we could not contact them to get us up to speed with work.

Please provide comments about your experience with performance management and evaluation process (i.e. what did you like and what didn't you like)

I really did like that we set goals at the beginning of the internship. I found it motivating and helpful to have concrete and attainable goals to work toward through the 10 weeks. I haven't been exposed much to the evaluation process, so unfortunatelv I can't give commentary.

Please provide any additional comments about your experience at Cisco and how we can make it a better one for future interns/co-ops:

I would like to come back to Cisco at least as an intern and I'd be interested in the same role that I had this summer, but I would be just as excited to try a new position such as one that involves developing technologies such as loE or Fog Computing and how software will play a role in their imolementation. To make things better: I think centralizing resources for interns would be helpful, such as links for their timecards with explanations for what each is for and a quick summary of how to fill them out. Also, additional resources such as condensed definitions and explanations of basic networking principles and their acronyms (I compiled my own list which I'd be happy to share, please let me know). Providing simple diagrams for how Cisco is structured as a company (and which groups do what) and where the intern, their manager, and others fall within that. A brief guide to understanding Cisco's products and what each of them do and what kind of customer would buy them.