My question is this:
I just got my B.A. (June 2010) in a major that is essentially Political Science + International Studies + Psychology + Sociology + Philosophy (all related to security, terrorism, war, and social changes).
In high school, we had the first four semesters of Cisco courses. Not sure if first four were CCNA, second four with CCNP, or if all eight were dedicated to the CCNA curriculum (I knew there was 8 courses total at a local C.C., ours mimicked the first four courses). I did just fine in the course, it was what I wanted to do, then I got bored and felt like I'd be miserable doing that sort of stuff as a career.
Still not sure, but I'm kind of tossing around the idea of trying it out again. Would having tech certs but a B.A. (versus a technical B.S.) hurt my potential? I'm also in the Signal Corps as a platoon leader, so just being in the environment (and saying so on a resume) could be a decent boost. In reality, I don't really get to do, well... anything. My platoon isn't even a tech platoon, but I frequently watch and talk about the tech with the JNN and Netops soldiers (JNN deals with the connections of the nodes, Net Ops actually does the routing tables and configurations for all the various hardware). It would be awesome if I could say I am actually in charge of all that gear, but not yet. I have radios, antennas, and vehicles under my name.
But yeah, I've been entertaining the idea of using my status as a Signal Officer and general knowledge of the equipment and configurations to make headway into a communications-related career... but that's going to be a tough sell with no certifications, considering the only relevant education I've had, thus far, was in high school.
In my free time I could study up with the books, but I definitely liked the hands on nature of the Cisco curriculum - actually making various connections and configurations is a great way to use what you read about, and for me is an easier way to drill that knowledge into memory.
Big thing we got to do was a major redesign of our classroom, it was entirely in our hands (with instructor oversight obviously), and we ran all the wiring, made all the connections at the patch panels and keystones, and made all the configurations in the routers.
Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending how you look at it), I did learn that not all manufacturers are equal in the ethernet cable world: considering I have a mild case of color-deficiency, some brands made it a major challenge to distinguish between the green and orange pairs, or the green and brown pairs, depending on manufacturer (so white-green, green, and white-orange, orange... sometimes was nearly impossible for me). Not sure if that would cripple the career opportunity or not.
Anyway...
For those who just went the books route, do they include software emulator environments for configurations?
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