Anyone work/worked at a university?

[rickjames]

Just asking out of curiosity, really. Worked in two independents (3-13 and 4-18 respectively) and decided it's time to step up, so I've found myself a new position as a Field Support Engineer at a university here in London. Chuffed, really.

 

So, to anyone who works or has worked at one, how'd you find it in comparison to other schools you've been involved with? Experiences, good and bad?

 

Cheeeeeers

[matt40k]

Poke @trolley01 @khoward

[Valyyn]

I've been in a school for about 4 years now, but before that I worked for Information Services at a Uni for about 4 years in various IT roles (from front-line support on the help desk and answering calls/emails, to time with the networking team running cables and such, to 2nd/3rd tier Desktop Services support, where we'd get sent out for the more technical issues that the help desk logged).

 

At the uni, I was part of a big team - my local team varied from three of us to eight in my various roles and there were probably about fifty people in total across various roles and functions. The pros were that there were good systems in place and training was very easy to come by and there was almost guaranteed to be an expert a call away to help with any issues you got stuck on. At the school, even though I'm in a team of four here, there is a lot less support - I've not had any training since being here... but then I have had to learn a lot off my own back and do my own research and experimenting, which is good for me too.

 

On the other hand, the uni had more of "that's not your job, that falls under X's remit"*, whereas in the school I am basically free to design or develop anything I want, as long as I can justify the time spent!

 

(*Not complaining about this - it's completely understandable! With that many people, you have to be clear or there's going to be confusion and mess and no clear lines as to who is responsible for what etc).

Edited November 4, 2015 by Valyyn

[GTX]

I worked at Shef uni for around a year. Loved it. You get looked after and meet some really interesting people!

 

Rick

[SteveBentley]

I work at a uni and I pretty much concur with Valynn. Here there is a big difference between the roles of our central IT guys who tend to work in teams which specialise in a particular area, and those of us in the various schools who have a more varied role that works with all of those central teams.

[elsiegee40]

@srochford @Little-Miss

[srochford]

The scale of everything changes - you move from a place with perhaps 2-3 people doing everything to working as a part of a much bigger team (Outlook tells me that the "ICT Staff" DL contains about 280 recipients). You don't have a few servers; you have hundreds of racks of servers (and in the case of a place like Imperial, a good few of them will be off-site for disaster recovery). You don't have to worry about getting access to internal stuff from outside and complex port forwarding setups - everything has a public IP so as long as the firewall allows it then you can connect to it.

 

In schools, you're often thinking about "how can we make sure people don't do X"; in a university it's much more about "I need to do X; please can you help". Obviously, you still need to make sure that people can't break things (we use Deep Freeze of our main teaching computers, for example).

 

You're probably going to have to provide a 24/7 service - that doesn't necessarily mean shift work (although quite a few universities now do provide IT support for all but a few hours overnight) but you can't just say "everyone's gone home by 5 so that's when I can shut down all the servers)

 

You can very, very rarely shut down all the servers - you need to make sure you have failover pairs etc so that when one server is being patched (for example) its partner can take over.

 

You're likely to be working in a much more focussed way - the people who run the backups only do backups; the people who manage the database servers only do that and so on - but desktop support (the area where I work) gets to deal with all the interesting people who do fascinating stuff.

 

Things are generally more controlled - there's likely to be a proper change management process - so you don't just decide "yes, we'll start pushing out Office 2016 today". You need to set up a proper evaluation process - will all the bits of software which link into Office still work (hint: if they're made by Oracle then the answer will probably be no). What else changes? Can you upgrade users? Can you roll back if it goes wrong? How will you know if it's worked?

 

Hope that helps to give some idea of how things differ :-)

[beaches511]

Currently working at a Uni after working 5 years in a 3-18 independant.

 

I found it a lot more gated in terms of what you can and can't do, i never touch stuff i used to do all the time (e.g.group policy) but then also have fare greater reponsibility in other areas. I find the work a lot less stressful.

Everyone pretty much wants to be here so no trouble making kids, though data protection and security are a major issue.

 

Pretty much doing 2nd/3rd line support although there is some 1st line in there as well, but mostly due to where we are physically located.

Projects get assigned out so the wider Uni ones tend to go to the core teams rather than the colleges but i think thats just how they are structured as colleges get all the local projects.

 

still get idiot users like everywhere but as said before the level of support and teams is much larger (though this can slow stuff down as you may be waiting on others to do things first e.g network team manages points and patching)

 

Theres the other benefits as well such as Uni catering, better tech and generally having money in budgets.

 

Its different but not hugely so

[jdoyle]

Congrats on the new role @rickjames Hope you find it goes well.

 

I've been working at Oxford Uni Press (OUP) since January 2015 after 8 years at a secondary. Have worked at colleges before (Tottenham as a tech; Southall and Elm Park as a lecturer) with stints in industry (IMS Health, Cisco, Anchor Foods)

 

OUP is a very Uni influenced working environment though we have no onsite students - I'm in the Online Platforms team providing 2nd line support for 400k plus students and teachers across the globe.

 

Less stress, more budget, more training, more pay, better working environment and more interesting conversations. Able to take annual leave outside school holidays: happy days.