The narration describes the intern's experience at a summer internship at UPS. It details the orientation process, projects worked on including health checks, bug fixes, and cleanup projects. The intern learned about UPS systems like DB2 and mainframes, and skills like SQL queries. Fun social events were held. The experience provided valuable lessons in teamwork, meeting deadlines, and experience that can help in academics and future career goals in mainframe systems.

1. IPP Assignment - Narration of Summer 2015 Internship at UPS
1. Activity Description
June 2nd, the first day at work in UPS (United Parcel Service). The 77 interns hired by
UPS for the 2015 Summer Internship were divided into batches of two, the first batch had the
orientation the previous day while I was in the second batch. The orientation was supposed to be
an entire day affair right from 8am to 5pm. As I arrived at the destination, it was a huge long and
wide brown colored 4-storied building. Always I pictured UPS as a package delivery company,
looking at such a huge building was surprising; UPS has more to it than just package delivery.
All the interns were present well before time for the orientation to start, who would want to get
late on the first day, right?
The orientation started with the HR head welcoming and assuring this to be a great
summer experience. The main task in this orientation for them was to get all the interns
processed i.e. to get all the information of every intern into their system, creating a profile,
signing the agreement, reviewing of official-legal documents, getting a picture clicked for the
identification card, and so on. The interns were called one by one and each intern took about 15
odd minutes for the entire process. Meanwhile, various employees proudly called as “UPSers”
from various departments presented things about their department and how they are glad that
some of us would be assisting them in their work. Apart from these activities, we also had few
fun activities lined up throughout the orientation session as a get-to-know-each-other exercise
and team-building exercise. We were also given many UPS merchandised goodies and at the end
we had a photograph taken of the complete batch. It was FUN!
The Second day started by reporting to my hiring manager followed by introduction to
the members of the team ‘Mainframe DB2 Systems Programming’ where I will be interning for
the next three months. Every day for few hours I used to get knowledge transfer from different
members of the team especially from my peer advisor or otherwise called as mentor. Every
intern was assigned one peer advisor who was responsible for assigning work, teaching and
explaining what work is to be done, etc. Initially I was not given any projects to work on,
because the focus for them was to get me familiar with the mainframe system. I spent most of
my time learning and exploring the different features of the mainframe system and the DB2
database, went through different books given to me by my teammates in order to get to know the
system that I will be working on. Once that was done, it was time for me to get working on
different projects that my manger had chalked out for the summer intern duration.
1.1 Projects worked on:
1) Health checks jobs (change records) for Ramapo Ridge production systems.
2) Moving bug fixes into production and monitoring its correctness.

2. 3) Package rebind reports for all the DB2 z/OS systems.
4) Setting up package rebind jobs for Sandbox systems.
5) Cleanup of old BMC and CA objects on Sandbox systems.
1.2 Project Objectives:
1) Health check jobs (change records) for Ramapo Ridge production systems.
Currently all the jobs in the Ramapo Ridge production system are recognized and
have been named using account codes; account codes are nothing but six digit unique
numbers but due to the limitation on the number of account codes, the names of these
jobs were required to be changed, replacing these account codes with meaningful names
that would simplify remembering the jobs.
It is always easy and feasible to recognize a job by some meaningful name rather
than by any number, but most importantly to follow the standards set by IBM. My work
was to set up different jobs for different subsystems in the Ramapo that would run in a
batch and update the job names. After setting up the jobs, I had to follow a six-step
approach in order to set these jobs into production. This entire process involved
interaction and involvement of two other teams mainly the DBA DB2 team and the SPM
team. This project is still in progress and it’s a yearlong process even though if one
manages to get two subsystems renamed in a week to the maximum.
2) Moving bug fixes into production and monitoring its correctness.
Having completed the first phase out of the two of upgrading the DB2 system
from v10 to v11 in March 2015, the team encountered several bugs, which were not
severe, but it was necessary to get them fixed before the final phase of the upgrade. My
work was to write JCLs with fixes in them, set them up to run in the production and then
monitor the appropriate jobs to check if the fixes were properly made. Since I was
working on the production environment, it was necessary that care was taken and the peer
advisor reviewed my JCLs, because making changes to the production data was delicate.
3) Package rebind reports for all the DB2 z/OS systems.
The package rebind reports are nothing but reports that contain data regarding the
different DB2 z/OS systems such as production, development, test, stress and mvs
environments. This data provides information regarding the amount of collection ids and
packages inside those collection ids that are present in the different production systems.
This information is very much needed in order to analyze which collection ids and
packages are being used, how often they are used, their criticality, which ones are not

3. used and so on. This is not a requirement of IBM but it requires us to extract this data that
will help us analyze and provide a detailed report to them.
I was assigned to run these jobs once a week on Monday and extract the data from
the mainframe systems to the spreadsheet. Then, analyze the data and generate a detailed
report with a specific format provided by the IBM to my manager which was after review
eventually sent to IBM for their reference.
4) Setting up package rebind jobs for Sandbox systems.
As mentioned in the above point what a package rebind report is and how it is
used for the different DB2 z/OS systems, one task for me was to set up similar kind of
jobs for the sandbox systems. Firstly, a sandbox system is a replica of the production
systems just that it is not an actual production environment. UPS has seven such sandbox
systems, specially used by other teams like the DB2 DBA team for testing purpose.
Though it is used only as a testing environment it has to be on equal configuration as the
other production and development systems.
My work was to set up similar jobs in the Sandbox systems that were set up in the
other DB2 z/OS systems, though the details of the JCLs were completely different based
on the system, I had to set it up for all the six sandbox systems except one of the sandbox
as it was still on v10 DB2. Post setting up the jobs, I ran them once a week on Tuesdays,
since we didn’t want to mix up the reports of the DB2 z/OS systems with these sandbox
systems hence they were being execute on two different days.
5) Cleanup of old BMC and CA objects on Sandbox systems.
One of the important projects was to get rid of the space occupied by unwanted
and unused data in the mainframe system, and though it sounds like just a normal clean
up, but the amount of space held by data specially which is unused is considerable and
since we are going to move into the final phase of the v11 DB2 upgrade, it was necessary
to make some space for future data.
The above package rebind reports helped in a way, we were able to identify the
amount of data i.e. collection ids and packages that are available in all the DB2 systems
including sandbox systems and we could make out which ones were not being used and
which ones have not yet been even used, using this data we could get rid of such data. I
was assigned to set up jobs that would read the spreadsheet through the mainframe
system and then based on that data and some criteria using SQL, it would go on to free up
the packages and collection ids. I started doing this for the sandbox systems, because
even if some package gets deleted that’s being used indirectly we could always restore
them until I got used to it and was able to find out the exact ones, and after a month I was
made to do the similar clean ups on the production systems.

4. 1.2 Projects in Future:
Apart from the above projects, some of which have completed while the others are still a
work in progress, but another project, which is lined up for the last few weeks, is to develop an
application using HTML and JAVA. So there is no such application right now with the UPS
production team that will assist them or give an easy access to the current status and also the
health status of the DB2 z/OS systems. So I design a desktop application that will help them in
just looking at the application and not actually going inside the mainframe system and querying
and doing all other things just to know what the status is which is time consuming.
This application will have a front end that will list down all the DB2 systems and an
indicator against each of them giving a red or green or yellow signal similar to the traffic signals.
So the back end will do all the process of fetching and querying and doing all the tasks that one
would usually do to know the status, and this would be working continuously, hence the
production team as well as my team will be able to just monitor the changes and if at all there is
any issue, proper and quick actions can be taken without losing time.
P.S. the prototype cannot be shared as per company rules.
1.3 Problems Encountered and it’s Solution:
There were a number of problems encountered at the early stages of the internship period,
because I was still trying to get used to, to the mainframe system. Though I had previously
worked on it but it was a long time ago, so making mistakes, I would say those mistakes were
made because of not knowing what actually to do.
For example, while setting jobs for the change records i.e. the Ramapo health check jobs,
it was difficult to make out if there was any inter dependency of jobs, say if A job was to be
changed, but it’s being used by some other job in it, then it was necessary to rename the A job in
that calling job as well. So this was a tough task to make out, as there were n-number of calling-
called jobs interdependency.
Apart from these, there were few others, little minute things which can result in the jobs
failing or not compiling at all at the first place. I always tried to find out solutions to it but there
were times where it was not possible to find out what went wrong, that’s when I took help from
my teammates. Moreover, my teammates never gave me a complete solution of anything, they
always gave me a hint, and based on which I was able to figure out what mistake I had done or
what I had missed that resulted in the mistake to happen.

5. 2. Analysis Section
2.1 Things Learnt from the experience:
1) UPS is full of acronyms. Right from the name of the company to every tiny detail be
it at the technical or the managerial level, most things are abbreviated. So it was
really tough at the start to get used to all these acronyms that fellow employees used,
but then slowly got used to it, because that’s how UPS works, on acronyms.
2) Using the Mainframe system, what people popularly call it as the blank screen with
green font. In order to work on mainframes, it is but obvious that I had to learn the
complete system, though there is so much in it to learn, a three month period is very
less, but I learnt how to use the TSO(Time Sharing System), ISPF(Interactive System
Productivity Facility), SDSF(System Display and Search Facility), SPUFI(SQL
Processing Using File Input), the Catalog Manager, the Change Manager, the
Detector, and so on. These features are so strong and so powerful which makes the
mainframe system strong and still cannot be replaced with any other platform for that
matter. The UPS vendors such as IBM, CA Applications and BMC provide all these
features. All these being the base of the mainframe systems, on which we generally
worked for 80% of the time, it was very important that I got familiar with the working
and functioning of all these features.
3) Being part of the Mainframe DB2 Systems Programming team, it was necessary to
understand and learn what and how the DB2 structure was i.e. what is a Sysplex, what
a LPAR is, what a Subsystem is and how they are interconnected, how do they work,
how many LPARs, how many Subsystems are there and so on. How many DB2
subsystems are in v10 and how many are in v11, since the entire upgrade had not yet
taken place.
4) The package rebind reports required me to set up a new database, different tables,
indexes, etc plus it required me to write complex queries which I could never write in
my academics or else where before. I was able to implement and understand the
concept of SQL in depth.
5) The package rebind reports also required me to export data from mainframes to the
spreadsheet. Pivot tables, a very powerful tool if you are working on spreadsheets, it
is more like the SQL on a database, but this is on the spreadsheet. The concept of
pivot tables helps us to manipulate data from the tables the way you want it but on a
spreadsheet. Somewhat similar to SQL, this helped me to organize data on the
spreadsheet the way the team wanted in order to analyze data. I was able to work on it
and helped me to come up with solutions.
6) Why package rebinds are required and how it is done.
7) Another major task that is part of the DB2 Systems programming team is the DB2
maintenance, which is nothing but upgrading from old to new version of DB2. A very
complex and rigorous process requires a lot of steps to be followed right from setting
up jobs that checks the status of the each DB2 system before the maintenance and
similar kind of jobs to be run after the maintenance to check if everything was and is
working fine, because if anything goes wrong on the these databases, entire UPS can

6. come to a standstill. A number of things to learn from it was the SMP/Es, the PTFs,
receive-apply-accept, when to reject a fix and when to restore.
8) Another important aspect to learn was what are the different data transfer methods or
techniques such as FTP or TRANSMIT. This is important because this has to be used
more than often.
9) Apart from these technical aspects mentioned above, there were many other things
learned over the period. But there were few other aspects that I was able to learn is
how the US work culture is, what team work is, working in a team is not that simple
and not hard but its required because that’s how companies run. Also, meeting
deadlines is a very important and critical thing, how to interact and increase your
network, and so on.
2.2 How this will help in my class and future?
Though Mainframes or anything related to it such as what a JCL is what a DB2 is are not
part of my academics, because Mainframes is not that familiar and popular in today’s high tech
world, but the knowledge gained in SQL would surely help me further in my classes where use
of database is required, everything requires the use of database and the knowledge gained here in
SQL would surely be of great help.
Moreover, how to achieve deadline, how to work on the task assigned to you when it
doesn’t work or the client or manager wants it in a different way then how would I manage
would be of great help and I would be able to achieve this experience in achieving deadline of
my class assignments and do things prior to the deadline and be on time, plus if there is any kind
of change introduced, I should be able to accommodate it with ease.
Apart from this, the knowledge and experience gained during this internship will
definitely help me find a job and pursue my career in the Mainframes, because having worked
before as well as now, I am sure that this is what I would like to continue to pursue because
Mainframes interests me.
2.3 Fun activities organized by UPS:
The 2015 summer internship at UPS not only involved work and projects and learning,
but it also involved various fun activities arranged by the HR team. Right from the Mixer Event
(party organized at an Irish pub for all the interns and higher management including the Vice
President), the Baseball Game (event for all the interns, their managers and the higher
management to watch the baseball game between Rockland Boulders and Japanese Stars), the
Hub Tour (an evening for all the interns to visit the UPS hub facility) to the BRG Millenniums
Golf Event (the miniature golf event held for all the interns to come together and have fun), all
these events not just allowed us to gel with other interns but also an opportunity to interact with
the higher management, how many companies give such a chance specially for interns? For all
such and making the intern experience really smooth, it was great working at UPS!

7. Appendix
2015 Summer Interns Batch 2:
Activities during the orientation session:
1) Know Your Interns activity

8. 2) Build the tallest tower using Marshmallows activity
3) Golf event
*The source of all the images is from the UPS website.