Cisco Academy - Day 1
So my first night at the Cisco Academy went exactly how a first day of any college class goes. Basically you don’t do much except go over the syllabus and nothing works right in relation to the computers. We spent the first 1/2 of the class watching the System Administrator install the Cisco software just to find out when we logged in it wouldn’t work. No big deal because the whole course is available online. The weird thing about that is Cisco apparently gets angry when students use their website to access course material. They will lock out a class if too many users are accessing the course through their website. I can’t figure out why unless it’s bandwitdh issues but you’d think Cisco could solve that problem.
The first 1/2 of the semester is going to be very similar to CompTia’s Network+. The course will consist of learning the OSI model and TCP/IP. I don’t think we’ll get much into actual Cisco specific material until later in the semester and even more in the next semester.
One really cool piece of software we get is Packet Tracer 5. Basically its a network simulator. So you can add Cisco specific routers with a variety of cards in the back. For instance I put up a Cisco 1800 series with a fiber and Ethernet cards in the back connected to a switch and a couple of computers. The cool thing about it is when I drilled into a router I could get to the command line interface of the router and make changes there. The end game is that I could construct an entire network in Packet Tracer and if it worked in the simulator it would work in the real world. I could even take the router configs out of the simulator and copy them into real routers. How cool is that?
The class was full and supposedly there was one girl registered for the class. She wasn’t there that night and I am surprised that only one girl was registered. We didn’t have too many girls in IT courses back in my college days (1995-2001) either but I expected more would be taking these classes some 10 years later. Not that I’m looking to meet girls, I just find it interesting that not much has changed with women entering the IT field. Of course this is strictly anecdotal evidence. I did hear about a study that suggested women are just as good as men in science and math (if not better) but they tend to choose fields in social sciences. That says to me that women tend to like dealing with people and men… not so much. Of course this is all generalizations and that will earn me nothing but trouble.
I’m not really interested in the college credit but for anyone who needs a lot of quick credits this class is one to consider. The entire course is divided into four classes. Each class is 1/2 a semester long so when I registered for this semester I registered for class 1 and 2. Class 1 will end in a couple of months and class 2 picks up immediately after. Class 2 will be in the same class room with the same instructor etc. So it seems like just one semester long class. However each class is worth 5 credit hours. So at the end of this semester I will have obtained 10 credit hours. Twelve credits is considered a full course load even though 15 is a true full course load. So by the end of the two semester I’ll have 20 credit hours and nothing to do with them. Too bad I can’t sell ‘em.
Well I’ve got some reading to do by the next class. Guess I better get to it.
