So I’m an Intern for my school’s IT dept.

Hello everyone,

I'm currently a senior in secondary school, and a while ago I was approved by my administration and school's IT dept to be their intern as apart of my school's senior internship program. This is pretty much my first professional position, especially one in the IT field, and I'm sort of lost on what I'm supposed to be doing.

To preface on the experience I've had (and to not seem like I'm just the "tech whiz" in the family):

• I've been a Linux user (arch) for about 3-4 years at this point
• I've worked on my own website for also 3-4 years (see: https://malingen.xyz)
• I'm currently licensed as a technician in US amateur radio
• I've been running my own home server as of a couple months ago (currently running a copy of wikipedia (see: https://wiki.malingen.xyz/), a sven coop server (see: https://www.malingen.xyz/blogs/blog12.html), and a bluesky bot (see: https://bsky.app/profile/laingaybar.malingen.xyz); Currently, I'm working on maintenance for the machine itself, which is a new HDD and a thermal paste replacement. You can see the hardware probe here: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=4334d8c35d
• My current home server stack is Cloudflare tunnels for HTTP etc/playit.gg for UDP for tunneling + Tailscale as a VPN + Debian 13 (iirc); Website stack is Cloudflare for DNS + Vercel for web hosting (hobby plan) + Gitlab for version control/file hosting
• I currently own the textbooks for the CCNA exam, which are great reference books for networking, although im somewhat spooked about taking the exam

I've only started my internship a couple weeks ago, even then after a bunch of bureaucracy with admin, and all I did on my first day was attempting to process work order requests for broken student laptops (some of which were broken because of a permissions error on chromeOS, not a manufacturer problem!), but couldn't even do so because apparently we need a email address that was used by the school when they ordered the laptops. Not only that, but the guy I was working with didn't really know what to do with me, despite getting a whole email thread between me, them/coworkers, admin, and the IT director. Due to scheduling problems due to block scheduling with classes and such, I pretty much can only work with the dept physically biweekly and, even then, every other day. To counteract this, the director is being politely persuaded by admin to get me to work on something on the days I can't be with them physically (eg. recently, a IT cybersecurity course (just your regular old "dont follow phishing emails", "follow state/federal regs regarding data handling", etc.))

I've been rather worried recently about if my position being this sort of underwhelming is normal, and I just have to wait and see what happens. Curious to hear your guy's thoughts, especially if you've work in the education sector and/or have similar intern programs.