Wilson Chang came to Penn in 1996 as an undergraduate mechanical engineering major. After about two years, he switched into psychology. Then he dropped out of school.

He was 21, and didn’t know what he wanted to do. He was able to keep his part-time job at Penn, which was in Student Registration and Financial Services (SRFS). After doing odd jobs for the IT department for a while, such as fetching equipment and manning the help desk, his student position turned into a full-time gig.

“That’s how I got my start,” Chang says.

Chang stayed in his position as a systems administrator for SRFS for a little more than seven years. But then he realized he wanted more of a challenge.

“After a few years, you want to get some more fulfillment out of whatever it is you’re doing for a job, or at least I did,” he explains. “While I was young and still not sure what I wanted to do, nothing else besides IT really clicked.”

He had the opportunity to move into Penn’s Information Systems & Computing (ISC) department, where he’s been a Local Area Network (LAN) consultant for about eight years. Now he dons the word “senior” before his title.

“I’m a lifer,” he jokes.

On one particularly rainy fall day, the Current sat down with Chang in his office at Sansom Place West to discuss his everyday responsibilities, the importance of staying calm when technology fails us, and how he rarely goes anywhere—even vacation—without his work laptop.

Q: What is your day-to-day role as a senior LAN consultant for ISC?
A: Most of my time is taken up with the actual job duties of consulting, meaning I will either have current projects or tasks with what we call customers or clients. I’m a consultant, but the difference between me or any guy off the street is that I only consult for Penn entities. We’re here on campus. We only exist for Penn people. So there’s an extra incentive for us to go the extra mile to really put the cus- tomers’ concerns and their satisfaction at the forefront. We can’t run away.

Q: Who are the people that are contacting you every day?
A: I deal mainly with Local Support Providers (LSPs). Because of this decentralized model that Penn has, what the Local Support Provider role is, is somebody local that the community funnels inquiries to, and then they can decide whether they can handle it or escalate it to whomever. So I would typically not necessarily be on with an end user, but with an LSP or an IT director. LSP and above.

Q: What type of requests do you get?
A: Part of the attraction of this job is that you may get up in the morning thinking that you know what you’re going to be doing for that day, but things may erupt out of the blue that take you through a complete loop. There could be an emergency; there could be a high-priority item. Things happen.

Q: What are examples of emergencies?
A: An entire school cannot all of a sudden log in to any of their computers. That would be pretty critical and those things have happened. Or, in the past, when some schools and centers would operate their own email service, all of a sudden email goes down. You know how people are with email, you can’t get email, you can’t send email. It’s an emergency, and if it’s a VIP that is affected, guess what, it all of a sudden becomes their No. 1 priority and if they can’t figure it out, who would they call? They could call us.

Q: How do you begin to figure out the issue behind something like, for example, servers going down?
A: That is, I think, part innate, and part acquired skill. Obviously you need some base-level skills. You can’t get around that. You can’t just wake up one day and know how to do this stuff. I’ve been at this for over 15 years, so I’ve made the most of that by taking every opportunity to learn about new things. The acquired part beyond the accumulation of skills is being able to calmly enter a hot situation because people are on edge when these types of high-level things occur—whether it’s a total outage or whether it’s some critical piece of their operation not working. People are already frustrated, so you coming in as the consultant, they’re all looking to you, and it would not really help the situation if you were to panic as well. It’s not for everyone, I would say. You have to be able to handle these tense situations calmly, and make them immediately at ease and able to put their trust in you.

Q: In all the years you've been at Penn, do you think you've seen everything?
A: No, that's impossible, but I've seen a lot. Not every situation has always resolved itself 100 percent, but I'd say I have a pretty good track record.

Q: What are some jobs you're tasked with?
A: Sometimes it's as simple as a department being temporarily understaffed, so they will need someone to fill that gap for them while they look for replacements. It could also be things like managing infrastructure—infrastructure being the building blocks that people may think of as general IT, so servers, storage, networking, those basic things are considered infrastructure. In the IT world, infrastructure is the technical building block that enables the higher-level things to happen.

Q: It seems the work you do is so behind the scenes, people don’t even think bout it. They just expect everything to work.
A: Because this is a common trap in IT, you are caught up in the technical kind of hows: how to do this, how to do that. But really I try to encourage people to not lose sight of the goal, and worry less about the how. My job is simply to gather the goals of the customer and accomplish them in such a way that it meets the customer’s expectations, exceeds it if possible, but then present them in a simple way, so that they don’t have to worry about the nuts and bolts.

Q: What do you find most enjoyable about your job?
A: When I have the opportunity to interact with my clients. In this field, you could be somebody that sits behind a desk, and there’s plenty of positions that you never have to ever speak to an end user, and that’s fine. It’s not right or wrong, good or bad. If that fits your personality, that’s great, but that can’t be me, I would never be satisfied. I’m a people-pleaser; I really enjoy meeting new people, learning what it is they want to accomplish. Every school and center, every department is different with what their mission is, and so if I can help them without having them necessarily learn about the technology, that’s wonderful. They don’t need to. Their mission is to not just learn IT, their mission is whatever they’re in charge of.

Q: Do you go out to sites often?
A: I take every opportunity to do so, whether they expect it or not. I'll always give people the option to meet in person. Sometimes when you're trying to explain a complex concept or issue, having that face-to-face meeting can ease that translation. But if they don’t have time, it’s at their discretion.

Q: Any interesting hobbies?
A: I watch way too much TV. It’s a sad state of affairs. TV developed as a ‘hobby’ so to speak because it allowed me to have something in the background while I worked. Most of the time it’s just there to keep me slightly distracted so I’m not totally immersed for too many hours throughout the day doing what I need to do.

Q: Speaking of hours, what are yours like?
A: Officially, what we provide the cusomers is weekday coverage from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Anything after hours we consider ‘best effort support.’ But for me, and it’s a personal thing, and it’s not anything expected of me, I can’t turn it off. For better or for worse. It’s kind of a 24/7/365 obsession. Like most everyone else these days, I’m neurotic if I don’t have my phone on me. I feel like something is missing, like my arm or something. But I hardly ever go anywhere without my laptop so that if it’s an email, I can reply, if there’s something that actually needs to take place, some piece of action, I’ll have my laptop in order to be able to do that.

Q: Even on the weekends?
A: Even on the weekends, even on vacations. I provided support during almost every vacation I’ve taken. Whether it’s to Southeast Asia, China, South Africa, to Europe.

Q: If Penn doesn’t require you to do that, do you feel like it’s just something you like to do?
A: I do. I do enjoy it. If I didn’t, I would have gone mad by now.

Q: What’s the best quality to be successful in a role like yours?
A: Going beyond the obvious technical ability, I think it is anything attached with customer service. What has immensely aided me was that I grew up working at my parents’ Chinese food restaurant. In that service industry, you learn to deal with people at a very personal level. You never know what kind of day a person is having. It’s unfair to have any expectations of them, and you sometimes need thick skin, but in the end you try to please them in whatever aspect they need.