Ben Fon: Running his school’s IT help desk

“In an environment where a university degree is becoming almost basic education, experience is what distinguishes one student from another,” says RMIT computer science graduate, Ben Fon.

While completing his degree and living at the University of Melbourne's Whitley College, Fon and some fellow students volunteered to take over the running of the college’s IT services, from server administration to intranet development and desktop support.

Within a short time, Fon helped formalise the college’s IT committee and worked with Whitley administration to boost the college's IT initiative. The committee has since grown from four to about 12 members

“Running a computer laboratory is quite different from playing round on your own personal machine", says Fon. "You can’t just re-boot servers or install software when you want to, you have to think ahead about what the impact will be. I wanted that experience which is why I volunteered.

“We had all the major problems of an Internet Service Provider or a corporate IT desk. Just solving those has been a real challenge and has given me an appreciation of what corporate IT desks go through.”

Fon is now working as team leader for an administration support group at IBM Global Services and believes the experience working for the college definitely helped him get the job.

“In my role I look at resumés on a regular basis. Students who have worked on the college IT committee come out with a very go-getting attitude.

“It’s not that they know a lot more than someone else or that they are better it’s just that they have had the experience, they’ve been in the situation where they haven’t known how to fix a problem but they’ve been encouraged to try and so therefore they are no longer scared of tackling big problems.”

And while it is sometimes difficult juggling study commitments with the demands of a job that includes around-the-clock room calls to solve residents’ computer problems and maintaining the college’s computer lab, Fon says this time management is a useful skill to gain as well.

“A lot of what we learnt at uni, we could start applying in the work we were doing and some of the skills I picked up in college I have been able to apply in my work at IBM, so it worked both ways,” he says.

Other IT committee members have also found their experience helped them to get a job. In recent years, Whitley IT committee members have secured IT-related positions at organisations such as the ANZ Bank, Bendigo Bank and the University of Melbourne.