What did one alumni, six seniors, three juniors, three sophomores, and three freshmen do this Thanksgiving? It might sound like the setup to a joke, but the real answer is that they went to the Dell Technical Skills Bootcamp.
Organized by Dalat students, this two day event consisted of a mix of theoretical and practical learning in an actual Dell facility in Bayan Lepas. The first half of both days were theoretical lessons, where Dell employees taught the high school students the basics on how their servers, networks, and cabling works.
For Zachariel Ooi (12), these lessons were so important that “even though [his] transcribing app broke, [he prepared] a physical notebook and pen to take notes.” Notetaking was optional, but they would come in handy for the second half of each day: practical lessons led by Dell engineers. These consisted primarily of “server teardowns,” where actual servers were wheeled into the classroom and students were able to disassemble them. From fan components to heat sinks, they took the machines apart piece-by-piece and examined their labyrinthian interiors lined with complex circuitry.
William Xia (10), one of the first to rush up to the servers when these practicals began, felt that “just being able to use our hands to work on the servers and handle things like the motherboard made [this] experience fun and worth it.” Though this may all sound rather technical and intimidating, Dell’s engineers were on standby to guide the students through this practical process, and the theoretical lessons were kept at a very beginner-friendly level.
At the end of the bootcamp, there was a closing ceremony co-hosted by Dell, represented by the site’s deputy general manager Jan Teoh, and the Penang Youth Development Council (the state government organization that sponsored the event) where students were given certificates for their participation.
One of the organizers, Nathan Ng (12), reflected on the event, remembering how he was “initially skeptical, but after I accepted Zack [Lee’s] invite and joined the project team, I found that it was really fun and I would want to do something similar in the future.”
In a similar vein, Yong Xi Tan (alumni) felt “very astonished that we went into Dell itself [as] I looked up to Dell over many tech-enthusiastic years, and found it an absolute joy to meet the creators of my laptops firsthand.”
For the high schoolers that came, these two days of the Dell Technical Skills sure left an indelible mark on their memory.
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