CISCO Academy students make impact in IT
By Kurt Anthony Krug
HFCC CISCO Academy students Ryan McKay and Hasan Dakroub recently completed successful internships at Secure-24, Inc. in Southfield.
McKay, who graduated from HFCC in 2011 with an associate's degree in Applied Science of Network Administration, is a storage area network (SAN) intern at Secure-24. His duties include assisting the SAN team with the administration of the SANs at each of the company's data centers. This includes the hands-on administration of all SAN hardware and the data stored, as well as working with the virtualization and operating system teams to provide the storage for server builds, and working with customers to resolve any SAN-related issues. His goal is to become a SAN engineer at Secure-24.
'The best way to do so is job experience, being ambitious and learning and specializing in new technologies,' said McKay. 'I had a great experience at HFCC and I couldn't be more impressed with their CISCO program, their co-op program and Secure-24's recruiting. I dealt with people who care about their students and their futures. Secure-24 presented me with a great opportunity to join their growing company. I am very proud to be a part of the Secure-24 organization,' he added.
After finishing the HFCC CISCO Certified Network Associate (CCNA) program in 2010 and the HFCC CCNA Security program in 2011, Dakroub completed his bachelor's degree at a local university. The day after he graduated, he began his internship at Secure-24. During his internship, he was given many challenging responsibilities, including setting up virtual private networks (VPN) and open shortest path first (OSPF) communication networks with live customers. Dakroub was hired as a full time network engineer after the successful completion of a three-month internship. He is now part of the implementations team, where he builds new networks for clients.
'The HFCC Networking Academy provided me much needed experience with their top curriculum and hands-on lab time. Instructors Taha Abdulkarim and Todd Browning were great mentors who were always there when I needed any technical or general questions answered. HFCC was definitely a great stepping stone toward starting my career in IT,' said Dakroub.
With the assistance of the HFCC CISCO Academy and the HFCC Cooperative Education Office, Secure-24 was able to obtain well-trained and savvy IT students to join the IT firm. Secure-24 provides a full service technical offering in support of SAP applications. The company's competency in enterprise application hosting and private cloud computing is recognized by strong partnerships with industry leaders like SAP, VMware, CISCO and EMC.
'HFCC and Secure-24 have begun to solidify a very symbiotic relationship that delivers us highly-trained technical talent and, to the students at HFCC, a continued update on exciting new technologies and developments in the marketplace. We're thrilled at the partnership, and look forward to continued involvement with a great program,' said Abby Wilhelmi, Secure-24 staffing manager.
To learn more about Secure-24, please visit http://www.secure-24.com/. For more information about HFCC’s Cooperative Education Program, please visit https://careers.hfcc.edu/students-graduates/cooperative-education.