For my third and final co-op term at ADTRAN, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and try Sales Solutions Engineering. While I had enjoyed my other two terms working as a full-time developer, I wanted to try something different and see if I liked a more business-oriented role. I enjoyed the high level of human interaction and variety of different tasks any given workday could consist of while still possessing enough technical problem-solving to keep me mentally stimulated. I worked with a variety of ADTRAN products like the Total Access 5000 and NetVanta 1638 while learning about general IP networking and fiber access technologies such as GPON and EPON. Sales Solutions provided me with the opportunity to gain a high-level perspective of ADTRAN and its customer base and then contribute to the success of the company by finding ways to do things more efficiently. One of the main projects I worked on over the summer was assisting a few of my teammates with a G.FAST demo pod that could be used to demonstrate ADTRAN's G.FAST technology to customers. Previously, each customer who requested a demonstration would get their own set of necessary equipment shipped to them. Then, a sales engineer would arrive on-site to set up the equipment, perform the demo, and answer any questions the customer might have. Afterwards, the sales engineer would return home, and sometimes the expensive equipment used for the demo could get lost in the shuffle. This ends up costing ADTRAN money. Sales Solutions Engineering decided that this process could be improved by setting up a demo kit for each technology that is shared among sales engineers and then ship this 'pod' out to customers as requested. The pods will be tracked in a similar fashion to library books, and they're completely self-contained which should ensure they don't go missing. While I cannot claim credit to this idea, I assisted my teammates with the configuration and assembly of multiple demo pods during the summer.

My second co-op term was spent working on Team Almost Hardware in the Common Core Hardware department. During this term, I completed a project to add USB support to a small, enterprise-class ethernet router. While basic USB support already worked, there was still a great need to improve usability and the implementation. A few of the lingering issues were that USB flash drives larger than 4 gigabytes would display an incorrect total size, USB hotplugging was unavaiable, and certain USB descriptors were incorreclty displayed. At the end of the term, all of these issues and others were fixed, and I presented the work I had done to my team members to determine product rediness. I also developed a comprehensive automated test suite in Robot Framework to help ensure future bugs created by new code additions wouldn't go unnoticed. I worked almost exclusively with the Eclipse IDE on CentOS 6 to develop C++ code. Since I was treated like a full-time team member, I also participated in morning scrum meetings and other AGILE practices.

During my first term as a co-op student, I worked in Product Qualification. My primary focus involved translating iTest procedure libraries to Python scripts for use with the automated test platform Robot Framework. I was able to significantly improve this process by creating a Python script to extract the documentation and basic structure from a given iTest XML file. This script would then create a basic Python class that included the documentation and method names, which was particularly useful on procedure libraries that were especially lengthy or over-documented. Through developing my script and translating the procedures by hand, I gained experience working with various Python networking libraries in an Ubuntu development environment .