My name is Zach Edman and I am an Intern at SDN this summer.  I will be starting my first year in the Business Management Graduate Program at the University of South Dakota in the fall.  During my time with the Marketing Department I have been asked to write several blogs for the website about my experiences here at SDN as well as how I have used some of SDN’s services throughout my time at USD.

Having lived on my own the past two years at the University of South Dakota it is easy to look back and think of everything that is not fun about living in the dorms at USD; little to no privacy, bad dorm food (although, that is only according to my friends, I found the food to be quite tasty), uncomfortable beds, etc.  I could go on for pages about the things I didn’t like about living in the dorms.  But the one thing that I can look back on and appreciate was the speed of our internet in the dorms.  As I said earlier, I have rented my own place to live the past two years, which means I had to find my own internet service provider and pay for it.  After having to deal with slow internet speeds, repeated calls to my internet service provider and numerous attempts to increase our speed, I decided that living in the dorms wasn’t as bad as I had thought for one simple reason: I could always count on being able to connect to the internet and have a fast connection.

I like to play video games online (when I am not devoting my time to my studies at the library) and the connection in the dorms was so much faster than the connection I have had the last two years it’s amazing considering the number of people who could be on the network in the dorms at any given time.  When I lived in dorms as a freshman and sophomore there was no wireless internet in the dorms and there were only two Ethernet jacks to plug into in each room, so if you had an Xbox you wanted to connect to the internet you had to unplug either yours or your roommate’s computer.  But now that all of the dorms have wireless I can’t help but be jealous of the incoming freshman and sophomores.  Well, except when the school doesn’t turn the air conditioning on until May, but that’s another story. 

 Zach Edman
Intern
SDN Communications