I was extremely grateful for my time at Hospitality Wifi over the COVID-19 summer. At a time when most internships were cancelled, or at the very least moved remotely, Hospitality Wifi was gracious enough to allow me to work in person and get hands on experience. What's more is that since Miami sent us home in March, I was able to begin work in mid-April and work through August, giving me a nearly 5 month internship. On top of this, they let me work remotely for them for my entire sophomore year of college under my own hours for which I was tremendously appreciative.

Hospitality Wifi is a company based out of Ada, Ohio that sets up networks and manages wifi networks for hotels worldwide. At the time I completed my internship, I believe there were somewhere over 1200 hotels under our management. Sister company to Hospitality Wifi is Say Security which operates under the same parent company and is housed in the same office building. They have an exceptional team who seem to bring in food for the office about twice a week which was, let me tell you, incredible. It's as if cooking was one of the skills required for the job. I could not give a higher recommendation to Hospitality Wifi; it has launched my career, so I owe them many thanks.

At Hospitality Wifi, I wore several hats. One of them was managing the Cisco Meraki Dashboard for our hotels, which is what the two screenshots are above. Cisco makes all kinds of networking equipment that we use such as gateways, switches and access points (AP). Set up correctly, you can access your equipment remotely through the dashboard. So our dashboard hosted the 1200 locations we had around the world and would alert us when equipment went down. The average hotel has about 60 devices and that multiplied by our 1200 locations gave us 72,000 devices to monitor. As you can guess, there was always equipment that needed attention. I would document outages, try to resolve them myself first, and then send them off to higher management if I could not muster a solution. Having not really had the opportunity to take networking classes at Miami since I had only one year of college at the time, I learned mountains of information about networking, VPNs, routing, hardware, and so much more. I really enjoyed this part of work the most as it gave me the biggest chance to solve problems and to determine viable solutions.

Other tasks I took on at Hospitality Wifi included actually configuring our hardware to be sent out. I had the opportunity to configure the aforementioned gateways, switches, and AP's as well as Chromecasts. What was interesting about the Chromecast is that we would configure them in the office in a hotel environment and then ship them out to the hotel, and they'd be ready to go. What we were able to do was configure them in such a way that only the Chromecast in your room should show up as a device that you could connect to, and other visitors' Chromecasts would not appear for you. Personally, I think that's awesome. Aside from configuring devices, I also went through our database of tickets (issues) for hotels. I'd document them and resolve completed tickets or send ongoing tickets to management to make sure the problem was resolved. If I remember correctly, I ended up completing almost 20% of our active tickets, which helped clear out the system and let our personnel on support focus on tasks with the utmost priority.