UMIACS is seeking highly motivated undergraduate students to work as part of it's technical staff. The UMIACS technical staff provides network and system administration, helpdesk support, hardware installation and decommissioning services, and research support the the Institutes 1000+ computer network environment. The UMIACS computing environment is a heterogeneous mix including Dell, Sun, Apple and IBM computers, Linux, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX operating systems, and Alcatel, Cisco and Nortel network equipment. Our computing deployment consists of administrative desktop computers, technical workstations, distributed computing clusters, high end SMP complexes, and a wide variety of servers. Some of our more uncommon installations include a 24 processor SunFire machine with 72 GB of ram, a 5x5 LCD wall attached to an advanced visualization cluster and a 30+TB 3PAR storage array.

Student responsibilities start with providing frontline technical support to users, setting up new hardware, removing old hardware, and the physical installation of support infrastructure. With time on the job and experience student responsibilities can grow to include planning, configuration, and maintenance of advanced hardware, software, and network components. Students are exposed to a wide variety of operating systems, development tools, and applications. Opportunities exist for highly motivated students to work closely with our research programs and related emerging technologies.

Our student staff positions are pre-professional positions that will help anyone hoping to pursue a career in many computer related fields, and highly motivated students will get the opportunity to get hands on experience with many enterprise level systems that would be unavailable to them otherwise. Also many of our student staffers have found that their experiences on staff have helped them with their later course work. In addition to that our positions provide some flexibility in scheduling to make it easier for student to meet their academic commitments. And unlike some student jobs where you are unable to work during the summer and breaks, our technical staff positions are year round with extended hours being available during the summer and other breaks.

Candidates should be well versed in basic computer use, and familiar with basic computer hardware and software setup and configuration. Advanced administrative experience is not required, but all candidates should have a strong desire to learn. Candidates should also be prepared to commit to at least 12 hours of work during the semester between the hours of 9:00am and 6:00pm.

We are currently searching for students for the semester. Interested students should send a resume and cover letter to staff-jobs at umiacs.umd.edu. In your cover letter please include the hours when you would be available to work. The deadline for applications is 9/13/2008.