By: Hailey Temple
Six students from the School of Information Studies (iSchool) graduate program in Telecommunications and Network Management (TNM) attended the Interop Conference and Exhibition in New York City earlier this month. The students accompanied Associate Professor of Practice Dave Molta to the conference to learn more about networking technologies built around the Internet’s TCP/IP protocol suite. This year, the Interop Conference featured Wi-Fi products from Xirrus, who specializes in deploying network solutions for large venues. Students had the opportunity to learn more about this and other technologies emerging in the IT world.
“I had never before had the privilege to be present at such a huge IT conference and was not going to miss it for anything. I was curious to know what it had to offer me in respect to learning what was out there in the different domains and also what job opportunities the market held for me,” said Sneha Phadke, a TNM student and conference attendee.
Students were provided with full-conference passes courtesy of UBM, which has a long-standing relationship with the iSchool. With this pass, students had the opportunity to attend conference sessions covering topics like cloud computing, bring your own device policies, network virtualization, and network security. During the sessions, students worked alongside IT professionals and interacted with top IT experts in their fields, including Craig Mathias, principal of Farpoint Group. Molta also chaired a panel session titled “Emerging Technologies: Key Directions in Mobility.”
“Professor Dave [Molta] has a lot of experience with wireless networks and he has been around the technology since the very beginning. He gave great insights on emerging technologies and how they would change the wireless market,” said Nilesh Hirve, another student attendee at the Interop Conference.
During the exhibition, students interacted with professionals and technologies from over 900 vendors, including Cisco Systems, Rackspace Hosting, SAP America, Inc. and Adobe. The exhibition provided a venue for students to network with major businesses and view the latest products emerging in the field. Demonstrations of these latest technologies not only caught the attention of students, but also inspired them to explore new paths in their current majors and for their ongoing projects.
