Difficulty Understanding the Lingo

Now maybe this is because I just started my Cisco classes in school but going through all the threads on this forum and reading all the discussions it makes me a feel a bit intimidated. You are all using terms and phrases that I never heard before and not sure if my classes will cover all of it. I see reference being made to the dozens of types of routers and switches, the combinations you can use, the difference between switch 2000x and 3577 (just random numbers), building up at-home labs that I way to broke to be able to afford, the vocabulary you all use, and how you have discussions tossing around all these suggestions about how to arrange or change or configure something to something else. I sit here reading everything trying to understand it all and my brain starts to hurt alot because I cant comprehend what I'm reading. Although I will finish college with my degree in network technology in spring, im nervous that Im not going to be able to regurgitate the knowledge or vocabulary that you all use. Do I study? Yes. Can i pass my classes? Yes. Do I feel comfortable in my ability to retain 100% of what Im learning and apply it to a work environment in spring? I dont know.
I dont know how you all have managed to absord and retain all this information and be able to recite it like its nothing but I am intimidated. Having absolutely no IT experience except for my school education, its kinda overwhelming.

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Comments

Yanio

I think a lot of people feel something very similar. I still don't fully follow the conversations about different models of routers and switches. I'm putting together my own home lab now and it's not straight forwards by any means.

Don't be disheartened, that kind of knowledge would only come from exposure to the hardware on a fairly regular basis. Same as any field, electronics, mechanics etc etc etc etc - ad infinitum.

As long as you understand the technical aspects of the things being discussed you'll be alright; again the troubleshooting can only really come from experience on physical equipment and labs. To begin with, packet tracer is your friend! "What happens if i do this....oh s$&t it's broken everything".

No-body can retain 100% of the information they're given, it's just not the way our brains work. If there are particular areas you feel you aren't strong in, focus on them until you feel better about it.

cyberguypr

Regurgitating what you have learned means nothing. If you focus on understanding the foundation of the technologies you'll be learning, everything else will come as you gain experience. This is how you get to learn stuff by heart, by touching it every day. Do not over think it. You'll end up freaking out and getting nowhere.

OctalDump

I had an experience early on with a particular piece of kit that had all these bells and whistle and doo-daas. I wanted to know what all those bits did, what all the options were. It seemed almost insurmountable at the time. But a couple of years later, I knew what all those bits did, how to configure them, why you'd configure them, and even a fair bit about the stuff hidden underneath.
And that's what I love about learning this stuff. You can go from near complete ignorance, to expert. It's like climbing a hill and then looking around from the top and seeing how far up you've come, but also seeing all those other hills that you haven't climbed yet.

I'm sure that once you start working you will acclimatise to the new challenges. You'll probably forget some of what you learnt, because you won't use it often - but that's what google's for, and you will at least remember that these thing exist - and other stuff will become second nature.

The key thing to IT isn't detailed knowledge, it's skills. It's being able to figure out the problems, and knowing where to get the information from. The necessary knowledge then accumulates fairly naturally.

rjon17469

In my opinion, the answer to your query is experience. Back before I started working with OSPF/EIGRP/BGP on a daily basis, I looked at them and thought they were all dynamic routing protocols, how different can they be? But when I started using them all the time, the differences became night and day.

Same thing with the endless hardware model numbers Cisco has. We have all thought that same thing at one point, just keep with it!

OctalDump

rjon17469 wrote: »

In my opinion, the answer to your query is experience.
Same thing with the endless hardware model numbers Cisco has. We have all thought that same thing at one point, just keep with it!

Yeah, I've worked in a few different areas in IT, and when you are dealing with stuff day to day you pick up lots of details - like model numbers and obscure difference between them - but stop working in that area and it slowly fades away and more likely becomes obsolete knowledge.

But we have Google, so if you really need to know what options Cisco has in mid range access switches you can find out pretty quickly, along with max IOS versions, RAM, flash, upgrades etc etc So once you know what an access switch is, you can pretty much find out all the other details. Do it a couple of times and you start to learn this arcane stuff by memory.