It sounds like you have a strong interest in high performance networking from your mention of Internet2, so you best gain will probably be from hanging out with people who are working on these projects while in undergrad, if this is possible. This should serve you much better than CCNA-type certifications which aren't nearly as focused on the bleeding edge. The key here is that you have to seek out and attach yourself to projects beyond what is offered by the CS curriculum. Your academic study is the basic thing you have to do, the really interesting stuff is participating in research.
That said, here are a few institutions for you to think about:
Indiana University - Home of the Internet2 NOC and has a lot of interesting research opportunities coming out of the Abilene Observatory project. Definitely a leader on the network operations side of things, a strong CS program and a fantastic CIO.
University of Michigan - A strong CS curriculm and many interesting things going on on campus. Also very close to Internet2 (also HQ'ed in Ann Arbor), so there might be opportunities to intern on projects there during the summers and during the year. The networking coordinator for the ATLAS project works in the UM Physics Department.
Cal Tech - Not really a safety school, but an interesting place to go if you can get in. A lot of networking research is done within Physics and at CACR, most notably the development of FAST TCP stack. Recently won an Internet2 Speed Record. A physics professor here (also strong ties to CACR) is the networking coordinator for the CMS collaboration (a detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider).
University of Illinois Chicago - The Electronics Visualization Lab is doing really interesting work in both high performance networking and applications that can eat a lot of bandwidth. The lab director is one of the principals of StarLight, a major peering point for high speed research and education networks. Probably the coolest reason to go to EVL - they worked on the Death Star in Star Wars.
This isn't an exhaustive list of good places to go for experience in networking, but it's a few that come to mind. There are lots of other great places that aren't mentioned that would be great, too.
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It sounds like you have a strong interest in high performance networking from your mention of Internet2, so you best gain will probably be from hanging out with people who are working on these projects while in undergrad, if this is possible. This should serve you much better than CCNA-type certifications which aren't nearly as focused on the bleeding edge. The key here is that you have to seek out and attach yourself to projects beyond what is offered by the CS curriculum. Your academic study is the basic thing you have to do, the really interesting stuff is participating in research.
That said, here are a few institutions for you to think about:
Indiana University - Home of the Internet2 NOC and has a lot of interesting research opportunities coming out of the Abilene Observatory project. Definitely a leader on the network operations side of things, a strong CS program and a fantastic CIO.
University of Michigan - A strong CS curriculm and many interesting things going on on campus. Also very close to Internet2 (also HQ'ed in Ann Arbor), so there might be opportunities to intern on projects there during the summers and during the year. The networking coordinator for the ATLAS project works in the UM Physics Department.
Cal Tech - Not really a safety school, but an interesting place to go if you can get in. A lot of networking research is done within Physics and at CACR, most notably the development of FAST TCP stack. Recently won an Internet2 Speed Record. A physics professor here (also strong ties to CACR) is the networking coordinator for the CMS collaboration (a detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider).
University of Illinois Chicago - The Electronics Visualization Lab is doing really interesting work in both high performance networking and applications that can eat a lot of bandwidth. The lab director is one of the principals of StarLight, a major peering point for high speed research and education networks. Probably the coolest reason to go to EVL - they worked on the Death Star in Star Wars.
This isn't an exhaustive list of good places to go for experience in networking, but it's a few that come to mind. There are lots of other great places that aren't mentioned that would be great, too.