The Best Colleges for Network Engineering?

viperstyx asks: "Ive come to that time in my life where I have to choose what colleges im going to apply to for my undergraduate degree. I'm very interested in Computer Science but I'm not sure if I want to major in Comp Sci, but I do have a high interest in networks. I hope to work on things like Internet2, or in a large business environment after college. I was hoping to find a college with a major, along the lines of Network Engineering, but I have yet to find one." What colleges have the best programs to prepare prospective networking engineers for the future?

Comments

It's not about the school...

[GuyZero]

It's about your own networks. People from unknown schools get onto interesting projects becuas hey know who's running them.

Get networking... with humans.

Re:It's not about the school...

[PopCulture]

agreed. there are unemployed grad students from uber cs schools, yet one of my best friends got a gig at Los Alamos after going to a {much} lesser known school...

Probably the best thing you can do is be born wealthy and connected. Failing that, get in early to the IEEE, or ACM clubs at whatever university you do go to- those are way good ways to make professional connections as an undergrad.

Don't just attend the meetings, meet the speakers when they come to campus. Talk to them, research the topics before so you can ask them intelligent questions. Be agressive but not rude... the professionals who go campus to campus generally have a personal commitment to making a difference.

Beyond that, I'd say the best way to get in to any really cool research project is to go ahead and get that doctorate degree in the feild you are seeking. Bachelors degrees won't matter much at that point... so you have 4 years (or 6.5 in my case) to worry about what school to go to...

Re:It's not about the school...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are only partially correct, but partially wrong as well. Going to an unknown school and building a network of morons is not nearly as good as going to a good school and building a network of brilliant hard-working people.
When you choose a school, you're number one consideration should be the people at the school. Going to a school where everyone simply shows up for their classes and then goes home is not that great, regardless of what is actually taught in the classroom. You want to be somewhere where a large portion of the students are active in an ACM or IEEE chapter, where people outside the school are coming to give colloquia, where there are a number of seminars each week, etc. If you do this, then you have a good chance of knowing a number of people running interesting projects and will get to choose among them.

All you need is expereince

[Nicholas_D]

All you need is experience, alot of online resources for OIS, but get your hands on experience with a 3550, 4500, 6500, 7200 (from cisco) get a CCNA... A Dergee in Net Eng is useless if youve never actually implimented a network or worked with a network. Book smarts does not cut it with network engineering.. you need practical experience with both physical (wiring) and software (ois or what have you)... Nick D

Re:All you need is expereince

[m0rningstar]

Mmm. I'm not a big believer in certs, except to get past the HR people. All the CCNA/CCDA/CCNP/CCDP/CCSP show is that you can take the test. (Qualifier: I do have many of these, primarily since it was a promotion requirement)

I agree with the experience thing, though I don't think the actual hardware is important; my lab when I was studying for my CCIE was 5 2500s and a 4000 used as a frame switch. And that was Feb 2000. I leased some time to learn ISDN and I got it, but I didn't have the expensive toys to study on. (I was working in the field; I was doing ATM at the time. Both of these helped ENORMOUSLY. I was lucky in that the company I'm with hired me with a CS degree and no certs and I made the time around the work hours to study.)

More important, however, is understanding the theory. And that is what I look for when I'm interviewing; not if you know the command on whatever piece of hardware, but if you know what you're trying to do and can show me that you know where to find it in a reasonable timeframe. I don't care if you can rote memorize commands, or know every IEEE protocol by heart.

It's in this theory and understanding area that, in truth, is where I see the college degree coming in useful. Mine (Manchester, UK) I've never used. But I do networking and security, and neither of those was a focus for that. It also took me 10 years in the field to realise that the theory was the important part.

The degree also opens a lot of doors from HR people again, though I don't think I'd specialise early either. You could look for somewhere with a Cisco Academy and hopefully get the best of both worlds; the 'cisco cert' and a degree that hopefully shows that you know theory.

outlook on things

[Kilka]

If your true to what you like to do, do it, even if the boat is already full. People that like IT for what it is will do better then most who are there to make a quick buck.

-Kilka

Learn both

[Gunfighter]

Nowadays it would be very much to your benefit to be a jack of both trades (programming and networking) and master of a few more. You may want to look into colleges that have good CS programs and then either tackle networking on the side (start w/ CCNA or something), or see if you can get a job working with the university's networking department. Best way to learn networking is hands-on anyways.

Experience Counts

[coronaride]

Not that I know anything, but this applies to everything: experience is vital. Go out and do consulting work to get your hands wet. If you know absolutely nothing start off in tech support somewhere - you will learn very quickly. I don't know about what employers are looking for, but I believe that experience would be way more valuable than a bunch of theory that you may have learned from some junior college prof.

Is that really a college degree?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll, but is that really a college-level degree? Unless by "work on things" you mean "analyze and design your own version of," I think a trade-school level degree, or some sort of MIS, plus the appropriate certifications might be your thing.

However, by sheer virtue of the fact that you "made it" through a more in-depth degree such as CS or Computer Engineering, you'll open yourself up to wider options, and possibly a higher pay. These degrees mean that, in addition to the basic knowledge, you're capable of handing large, complicated projects (if you have a good Capstone program at the school you look at) and have good problem-solving skills, things that aren't, necessarily, taught at a trade-school or 2-year level institution.

Of course, I'm biased as I'm about 3 months from finishing my B.S. Comp. Engr, and 1 year, 3 months from finishing my M.S. Electrical Engr (Yay, 5-year program!).

Posted Anonymously to protect the names of the (not so) innocent.

Cal

[brjndr]

The University of California Berkeley is an all around great school for computer and engineering related fields. Although, when I went there I didn't major in CS or EECS, many of my friends graduated from those programs, and then went onto jobs dealing with networking technologies.

Re:Graduate School

[eap]

Study CS in undergrad. Wait until Graduate School to specialize.

It definitely helps to have a CS degree under your belt. Many companies consider this a more rigorous degree. As an engineer, I also visit campuses to recruit for my company, and individuals with networking type technical degrees with all the certs like CCNA, MCSE, DVDA, etc. are all over the place. We hire for these types of positions, but look a lot more seriously at someone with a CS degree. I'm sure you are one of the ones who actually knows how to think, but many companies think a CS degree is a better indicator of problem solving skills and believe the curriculum is more rigorous.

If you find the right prof in college, you won't have trouble specializing in any niche of CS, including networking. Don't limit yourself to one single aspect of computers this early.

ask yourself

[illuminatedwax]

Here's the real question: do you want to be a scientist or an engineer, or do you want to put stuff together?

Because if you want to STUDY or MAKE things, go to a good CS school: MIT, U of I, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago (shameless plug, plus U of C will teach you more than just computers). Those are just the top schools off the top of my head, and are necessarily the best schools. I'm sure your own local schools might be good enough. My advice is not to look for a "networking school" as that amount of specialization is not what you want from a university education. See below.

However, if you want to USE things, then get yourself to a trade school, community college, or hell, just teach yourself and get the certification. No need to waste all that money learning about theory, writing papers, etc., when you can just study how to build and maintain networks.

Of course, I'm not saying that this is somehow a 'lesser' pursuit; instead you'll learn more specific skills suited to where you want to work: networking.

--Stephen

Re:ask yourself

[Dan Farina]

Cough. A notable omission from your list includes, at the very least, University of California at Berkeley.

Shameless plug.

Re:Graduate School

[sasami]

I agree with your post completely, but let me make an emphasis:

If you are going to a University for the sole purpose of getting a well paying job, you're probably going to be surprised. Universities don't train you to be good workers, they are supposed to teach you to think and be relatively well balanced intellectually.

In other words, education is not simply job training. But most undergrads are getting mostly the latter. People need to realize that a university's primary responsibility is to its graduate students. They are not optimized for undergraduates. The best undergraduate experience comes from colleges, which generally do not have graduate schools.

This is borne out by the observation that graduates of small, high-quality liberal arts colleges outperform graduates of universities in almost all fields including science and engineering. To rub salt in the wound, many of these schools aren't very selective, taking B or C students and turning out top-notch competitors for spots in grad schools and the job market. (For more information, start here but be sure to do more research.)

This is not hard to understand when you realize that a genuine, broad education isn't meant to teach you stuff, but to make you smarter -- in exactly the way that learning assembly language or lambda calculus makes you a better coder even if you don't use it or even like it. For me, humanities courses were what really forced me to think faster, harder, and deeper than I imagined possible. NOTE WELL: this never happened with computer science because I was already good at that. The result is that today I'm a well-paid kernel developer and my friends who went to a techy college are unemployed Javaheads.

--
Dum de dum.