An inside view of internships and graduate apprenticeships at EPCC

Aaron Watkins (pictured below), along with a number of our early career staff, first joined EPCC via the 12-month System Administration internship that we offer to undergraduate students about to move into their third year. 

We're proud to say that Aaron - like every one of our interns since 2018 - remained with EPCC after his first year and transitioned onto the graduate apprenticeship programme. This allowed him to further his studies while building knowledge as part of our fantastic team, and at the same time adding huge value to EPCC as he used his evolving skills to support and develop our services. Aaron's drive and positive attitude demonstrate why EPCC is committed to such an approach, which allows us to nurture and develop the next generation of IT professionals while our services benefit from the enthusiasm and knowledge they bring. 

Aaron will be leaving EPCC to take up an HPC role elsewhere in September, and we wish him all the success he deserves in his future career!

Below you can read what Aaron has to say about the time he spent with us.

Aaron Watkins gives an insider's view

If you had told me at the end of my second year of university I’d end up graduating with three years of experience and a job with ‘Senior’ in the title, I wouldn’t have believed you for a moment. But life has a funny way of surprising you.

I joined EPCC in September 2020, during the depths of Covid-19 restrictions, on a year-long internship program with the Systems Team. This full-time working would take the place of a year of academic studies. My degree subject was Cyber Security, so moving into HPC was new territory, but a challenge I was happy to take on. All my experience until that point had been in simulation, VMs, and home labs, and nothing could have prepared me for the vastness and variety of the systems at EPCC. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t overwhelmed by the immense scale of the ACF on my first-day tour!

From the first week having a team around me who cared about my development, and understood that although I was working, a major part of my being there was to learn, immediately made me feel comfortable. All of my colleagues were happy to explain things to me and take me through the organisation's processes step by step so I could learn by doing. This was one of the first major differences between work and university I felt, working in context. The internship allowed me to learn technical skills in an actual live environment, which is massively different to an isolated virtual university lab. Having to consider wider data centre networks, storage systems, external authentication and resource utilisation opened up my perspective of the whole technical ecosystem. This point of view is something I could never have gained at university alone. It was overwhelming to begin with, having to consider knock-on effects that could be much further away than systems I’d worked on before, but after the first few changes I began to understand how all the pieces fit together.

Over the course of the year I absorbed more practical knowledge than I could ever have anticipated, in areas including helpdesks, Windows and Linux administration and troubleshooting, datacentre hardware installation, cabling, and multiple network configurations. Some I had touched on at university, such as Ethernet switch configurations, and others were completely new. But going from Packet Tracer simulations to a full data centre deployment of a new management network is quite the step up!

Equally as important as the technical skills were the day-to-day skills I gained being in a work environment, including greater task prioritisation, project management, communicating with a range of different technical and non-technical colleagues, experiencing the inner workings of an organisation and all the extra considerations that entails. Understanding how I fit into an organisation and what was expected of me from various angles before even finishing university avoids a shock when going straight from university to work after graduation. All these experiences set me up fabulously to start the graduate apprenticeship scheme at the end of my internship.

Graduate apprenticeship scheme

Graduate apprenticeship schemes were still a relatively new concept when I enrolled. The first cohort of Cyber Security GA students at my university, Edinburgh Napier, were yet to graduate. However, EPCC were already well aware of these courses, with two of my Systems Team colleagues already enrolled on them. After completing my internship, EPCC offered me the opportunity to stay for another two years, working four days a week and spending another at university to take classes and exams, which I gladly accepted.

Returning to university after a year out made me realise how much I’d learned during the internship. Although it was only a year, I felt vastly more in tune with what I was being taught. I could picture when and why the concepts being explored would be applied, rather than just learning them as isolated ideas without understanding how they’d link together. Being taught through structured lessons again allowed for useful revision of things I’d done practically at work as well as filling in the gaps of concepts I’d only lightly explored. Working and studying simultaneously massively enhanced how much I was learning. The two complemented each other spectacularly, and the amount I learned in such a short time still surprises me. 

With a year of work experience under my belt and being taught more advanced topics on the GA course, I was in a position to contribute much more to the organisation. 

I moved from an administration and support type of role to being involved with the development and expansion of production services, mainly around the under-construction EIDF. This allowed me an unparalleled view of how large-scale systems function and the opportunity to implement the numerous technologies that go into managing them, including bare metal commissioning of hypervisors and switches over a network, configuration management of VMs, hypervisors and switches via technologies like ansible, physical and logical data centre wide networking, all the way up to in-cloud customer environments. 

Paired with the topics taught at university around Linux network services, best security practices and how organisations use technical systems, I was able to contribute to the designs, then configure and deploy numerous aspects of the EIDF service, as well as provide training to the next generation of interns, GAs, and become the Systems Team point of contact for some aspects of the service.

In October 2023 I graduated from Edinburgh Napier University with a First-Class Honours in Cyber Security and the University Medal for highest course score. A result that still shocks me to think about, and which wouldn’t have been possible without the support, experience and freedom to experiment provided by an internship and graduate apprenticeship with EPCC.

My progress from running cables in a newly completed computer room on the internship, to co-leading a division of the Systems Team and being the technical lead for multiple systems by the end of the apprenticeship, all in under four years, is testimony to how much can be gained from these courses and a team that supports you.

As I look ahead to future challenges, I can think of no better circumstances in which to have started my career. I am immensely grateful for the opportunities EPCC has given to me over the past few years.

To any young people either already on or about to start their university journey, I highly recommend a graduate apprenticeship course, and EPCC as a place to pursue it!