Topic: Anybody taking any Networking courses?

I lucked out and my Hign School landed a sweet deal from Cisco systems. We get to take the first 2 of 4 semesters at my school for free. Saves well over $2000, and if we want to take the last 2 we get a 50% discount. Pretty sweet eh, and all we have to do to stay in the course is keep a 75% average.

Sum of the stuff is pretty hard to grasp, but over time u get the hang of it all. Learning the layers and there functions of the OSI model was kinda hard, now were gettin into programming routers. Very cool stuff. Not lookin forward to subnetting though.

Anyone else taking this type of course? How do u like it? What do u find difficult about it?

I set up a peer to peer network in my room, Tbase-100 direct connection. Getting that to run (Actually, there was a crapload of problems at first... Dam windows) is about the limit of my networking "expertise". I really want to take a course and learn more about networking though. It's really fun ;o)
Unfortunetly I live in the boonies, and go to school in Idaho. Now, Idaho does NOT have public education down worth a poo. The most I'll be "learning" in high school (I'm currently in Middle School) will be "how ta speek and speel gud".

Anybody know of summer camps where I could get some cool networking and design classes?

Here is my opinion about this. I am no pro, but I do this for a living. I work closely with Networks (token ring and Ethernet) for a big consulting company (hint: Ross Pero) I did take some courses for MCSE about 2 years ago but didn't go for test since I knew they would expire soon. Now we are in Win2000. Tests are much harder and complex because Microsoft started to noticed a LOT of "paper MCSEs".

Remember the old good 7 OSI Layers eh.. pain in the ass. The route I went was trying to learn as much as I can "hands on" if you have a chance to do it. Going just to classes without any "hands on" experience would be waste of time and money. Make sure you understand how it works... mess with it till you get it.

That is my ten cents to this...

next year, at my high school, I will be taking CISCO classes all year. 1.5 hours a day. and all for free.

~Aaron

Why are schools only getting around to teaching real computer courses NOW? When I was in high school, our computer class consisted of "This is a computer. Now get your ass to gym class before you actually learn something."

Sheesh. All I can say is, "lucky buggers"!

Wangenstein

There are a lot of strange people in the world... I should know; I'm three of them...

welcome aboard wangen. I love your sig.

Spam is yummy
~babamba

yeah, im doing this stuff at uni now... its pretty sweet.
i like it, and here, we do the lessons, then do prac, like whip up a network with a coupla hubs. neat stuff.
i wouldnt mind getting a CCNA to jack up my asking price a little, but its not priority for me.

Its a waste of time. You don't learn much in a class, cause you spend all your time waiting for things to get explained better to so and so who has a problem understanding this, and so and so who has a problem understanding that. You want to learn, the best way to do it is get a couple books and finding a place where you can volunteer your time to learn by doing. You can learn as much as you'll learn in all your courses in 3 months of actually doing stuff. Also, you get experience this way, which is way better for finding a job than a piece of paper. Unfortunately, not everyone can find someplace like that.

At least Cisco's are the best meaningless piece of paper you can get. If you have your CCNA and you show that you are capable you won't have too much trouble getting a job to start off.

About the MCSE thing, microsoft tests are still retarded easy. I dunno where you heard about these magical hard tests, but they are a fairy tale. People have been trying to pretend MS tests were hard ever since they came out, mostly to try to make themselves feel smart that they passed them. The win2k tests are still easy, and don't give any indication of whether you know the subject, but just whether or not you know how to take MS tests. You can spend 2 days studying and pass an exam you know absolutely nothing about.