Joseph Vinson | Class of 2020

High School: Maggie Walker

College: Virginia Commonwealth University

Current location: Richmond, VA

 

Tell us about what you’re up to these days.

I am in school for Computer Science with a minor in Political Science and Information Systems. Information Systems is essentially computer science for business.

Computer Sciences, we learn about every possible field that uses programming and Info systems is more catered to how we deal with monetary transactions.

Right now, my internship is with the Supreme Court of Virginia. My title is Mainframe System Intern. I’m basically helping wherever I can with the mainframe.

Within high-performance computing you have servers, and then you have mainframes. Servers are good at doing a couple of complex tasks, mainframes are really good at doing a bunch of simple tasks. Mainframes are thousands of things a second, and servers are hundreds of things a second. A lot of the code for the Supreme Court of Virginia is written in this really old programming language that is not very good, and it’s very difficult to learn. It’s called Cobol. I go through Cobol programming and translate them into Java so that we can give them to a Java programmer, and they can write it into Java. They are using an operating system that is over 40 years old, so they are working to modernize it.

 

 

How did you land this internship?

Before school started, I went to a summer program, through VCU, and because I was a bit more active in the summer program VCU emailed me about a conference opportunity on campus. I went to a VM Workshop because I recognized the logo/mascot and thought I might know a little bit about what they were going to discuss. Turns out it had nothing to do with VM and was all about mainframes. The people in this workshop all knew each other. I was the new young person in the room. Word spread around to the head of the committee for the conference that I was the youngest person interested in mainframe programming. He works for the Supreme Court of Virginia and approached me about creating this internship position. He actually retired last year and had been working to get younger people to learn under these guys that had been doing it for so long. They are really eager to get new people to come into this because they look at it as a dying language. I am by far the youngest person working in this part of the Supreme Court.

 

 

What skills or knowledge did you learn at Seven Hills that has helped you along the way?

I think I benefited from the student-to-teacher ratio. There is a really good way of building a balance between: I can talk to this teacher about anything, but I also listen to them because they are there to guide me and teach me. There is a similarity between when I was at 7HS and now. I am talking to coworkers who have been there for 40 years who know a lot more than me. We both find similar things interesting. We can talk about computers and weird tech for 30 minutes, but they are also there for me to learn from while learning Cobol.

It is different from having a friendship with a peer, but also more than just a student-teacher relationship.

 

 

What is your favorite memory from Seven Hills?

River Days were always really nice. A couple of particular River Days I really enjoyed. We played a game that was essentially Sink or float, and we lost a bowling ball in the river. Also, one day I found a box of baby possums.

 

 

What advice would you give to today’s Seven Hills boys?

1. To always ask questions. Sometimes you really can’t understand something from searching online. You’re really only going to find out from the person who works with whatever you are asking about.

2. Not to write things off, and to kind of reintroduce yourself to different topics. Because you can think you don’t like x, y, or z, but you will inevitably change and most likely your views on that will inevitably change.

3. Never pass up what seems like a small opportunity.