Sam Mcgrath Email & Phone Number

I'm currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in computer science and a minor in cyber security at Iowa State University. During my time at Iowa State, I have been elected as a resident hall president, competed in three hackathons/coding competitions, won a state competition for the CFA Research Challenge, selected as a freshman member to the ISU Wall Street Club, attended events hosted by the Computer Science Club, participated as a captain for an intramural softball team and participated in intramural basketball and volleyball. While I prioritize academics, I enjoy participating in extracurricular activities. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I had the opportunity to intern at Principal Financial Group. This was a great experience where I worked on their Employer Webpage and helped design and create a new census processing page. While both of these projects helped me learn ReactJS and the principles of agile development in a professional environment, designing and creating the census processing webpage helped me learn how a professional team whiteboards and plans to create a new solution for an existing problem. This experience has carried over into how I prepare and plan large projects at Iowa State. I also participated in a hackathon where a team and I created a website to help further Principal's inner source mission. We hosted this webpage using AWS amplify and managed data with AWS DynamoDB.During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I was an Corporate IT intern for Caterpillar Inc. This experience was truly remarkable. I was able to engage in meaningful projects, receive valuable mentorship, and connect with some really talented individuals. I was also able to get a much clearer picture of how an IT department works within such a large company. Originally, I didn't know how far IT expanded beyond helpdesk support, but within Caterpillar, IT creates the baseline environment for every single business unit to perform their job. I was able to see different IT teams ensure secure connections across different locations, identify and patch vulnerabilities for applications used throughout Caterpillar, provide configured devices for factory floor and workforce users, establish secure environments for specific contracts, and provision on-premises or cloud assets to help other teams achieve their objectives. Overall, this internship was extremely beneficial, not only from a technical perspective, but it helped me get a better understanding of how a large corporation operates between different business units.