TSS Internship

I had the great opportunity to participate in an internship with the TSS Corporation. The internship started in January and lasted until August 1997.

As a computer software services organization, TSS provides a wide range of software engineering, contract programming and operational support services. TSS has specialized in Tandem platforms since its inception in 1988 and has been a Tandem Alliance member since 1990.

I was assigned to a project at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. My duties where to develop stored procedures for ODBC that act as a gateway to the medical data. The gateway's job is to validate the user and keep an audit trail of the data that the user is viewing or altering. Neither the Mayo Clinic nor anyone at TSS had implemented something similar to these stored procedures. This gave me the challenge of designing the stored procedures from scratch and the experience of researching their implementation.

Besides the technical experience I also gained valuable interpersonal experience. During the internship I put a lot of attention into the way I met with my boss at the Mayo Clinic. Since he was a manager of a good sized team he had a lot to do and no time to waste. As a good policy I informed him of the problems I encountered and offered several different possible solutions.

Both companies were very pleased with me and offered me a good permanent position. Unfortunately, because my wife is studying at Iowa State University, I had to decline the permanent employment offers from both companies after my graduations.