I think that I'll have to get some hands-on experience as an intern before gauging properly. You do make it sound both fun and frustrating as fuck, so that's probably the only way for me to decide. Thanks! That's half of the reason behind why I study maths and physics! I love working my way through anything. The weirder and more confusing, the better. Hah. I'm mainly started doing it because I won a voucher for course of my choice at one IT training centre. If it will keep on being as cool as it is now (or I would get a good reason to get the fuck out of academia) I don't think I will feel satisfied with CCNA. I'm actually already anal about it due to colour blindness. When most cables look to you either black, grey, blue or brown and people tell you that 'the orange one connects X to Y rack'… you buy a hand-labeler, zip-tie bands, and keep meticulous notes like an OCD freak. Instructor even remarked that I'm either a suck-up or top material for networking purely because how my station looks. ;) If you would happen to have anything to add, I'm always happy to get more insights like the one you gave already. Thank you once more! :DBecause for every horror story there are at least a hundred kick ass stories where I truly helped someone, where i did what everyone thought was impossible.
Then you have the day that Cletus in a backhoe runs over the fibre connection to a remote site and you have 50 people screaming at you.
At the CCNA level you won't be dealing with end users so your experience will be different than mine.
If you like challenges, puzzles, WTF's, solving complex riddles?
certs
And for the love of all that is holy and decent in this life learn cable management like it is a new religious faith.
To add, Devac - Young whelps with an interest in more than email, snapchat and Office are useful in colleges because the college IT department undoubtedly has work study and that work study is full of people who can use you at no cost to themselves. You can learn a lot from them but more importantly you can see deployments much larger than you would ordinarily see. If you show proficiency you will end up with more responsibility than you should probably have. This is a useful "nerf" environment where you can make mistakes, learn stuff and gain recommendations from people who actually have clout. You can also experience what users are actually using, what they wish they were using, and what they're likely to be asking for two years from now so you can get ahead of the curve. Being young and informed and willing to learn will serve you a great deal of benefit even if IT does not end up serving your purposes. Many small, agile organizations often rely on multitasking. Having a, say, Maths grad who also happens to know networking automatically puts you ahead of every other Maths grad they're interviewing. My wife took exactly one class in MS Access in her spare time for free and it was the impetus needed for the special projects team within her multinational accounting firm to snatch her out of bookkeeping and turn her into a software architect. People who work in IT rarely have the time or impetus to explore the fringes. As a young inquisitive kid you can explore the bejeesus out of the fringes which makes you informed and appealing.
Much appreciated, thank you! :D That's actually a rare practice here, at least on my university. Job at uni IT is closer to actual work time-wise and it's mostly for people during their senior year as most science departments are organised so that fifth year (we have ETCS here: 3 years for BS, 2 years for MS) is almost exclusively for doing your thesis. That way students can get some extra work experience while still having ample amount of time to do their projects. While it's a neat solution in general, it also means that it's nearly impossible for an undergrad to 'beat' a senior grad student's resume. For instance, they already have a college degree. ;) That said, I'll look around. Uni IT wasn't really on my radar for the above reason, but I know that there are various options. As always: ideas, tips and pointers are appreciated, but our respective countries have certain idiosyncrasies that could make them less applicable.college IT department undoubtedly has work study
Wow. By all means, please add. I'll make sure to check on this post. That's quite a lot to assimilate, so please extend the update courtesy to me and give me some time to formulate follow-up questions. Right now I have mainly a digression regarding the quote: While it is something that came to my mind (thanks for the link to the store by the way!), I would just want to say one thing regarding why I'm so often talking about my colour blindness. Perhaps it would also give you some ideas or tips? Maybe you can see some future difficulty that I may face? I don't know. I don't need to explain to you how hex-codes work or what's the display colour depth, so I'll just cut to the chase: I can see less than 0.11% of red-green mixes, same goes for contrasts. That means that for constant Blue in RGB code, there are only about 200-400 combinations of red and green that I can differentiate. And it's not the case for all values of blue, some can make it even harder despite it being the only pigment that is not impaired. To illustrate: this, this and this are almost exactly the same for me. Second one is slightly darker, first and third are identical. It's a pretty severe case all things considered.You might even want to think about using the different connectors as a way to segregate cable due to your limited colour palette.
If you look at the boots surrounding the crystal ends you will note that they use different styles of coverings. Since you have a colour issue, choose an end cap for servers, a different one for routers etc. Use bare ends for end points, the FlexBoots for something else, you can even use the flat cables for stuff like phones, printers, etc. Since color is out, use tints. Black, blue, yellow, white, combined with the ends, and you get dozens of combos. Cat 6 cables are a different thickness and are easy to tell apart. Stick with Black and white and blue and that covers routers, switches and uplinks. Cat5e, if you can see the color yellow, use that for the critical stuff like VM servers, Email gateways etc. The most important thing is that you get with the people who touch your patch panels and enforce the standard... and if you can get them to do that consistently, write a book and share your secrets with the rest of us. But as you are forced to label everything, guys like me that come in after you will sing your praises as NOBODY labels their shit anymore. And thanks for the badge.