What Should I study

jeremy8529

Hello, some of you might recognize me from the security+ section, I am a high school student from the great state of Tennessee that in in FBLA that competed nationally this past summer, and this was possible in part to your help recommending study materiel, I was able to place top 10 nationally in the cyber security competition mainly by reading so much security+ materiel that I could remember it in my sleep.
This year, as a finale for my senior year in high school I desire to make it to nationals again, but this time in a network design competition. The competition, is a 2-3 person competition, consisting of a written test and a judged practical exam. In the judged section, you are given a scenario, a white board, and 20 minutes to design a rough draft for a network solution for any given scenario. Usually it is designing a network for a small to mid size business from the ground up. When your 20 minutes is up, you and your team go in front of the panel of judges and get to play “network design team” and they pretend to be customers/ critics.
So my question is this, what certification materiel would help me this most with this, im wanting to study network+ and server+ to learn the ins and outs of how everything works, but I need something that would help me in a more hands on situation, like which switch to use, what kind of network cable, and how to estimate the cost of a deigned network. I'd like to learn some vendor specific stuff as well, such as Cisco and novell. I already have a good security+ background so that should help, but what I need is some specific recommendations as far as books and materiel for me and my team to read. We have like 7 months to get ready for the first competition, so we can cover a lot of materiel.
Thanks in advance.

Jeremy Langford

matt79

Well if you have the time I would do the Cisco CCNA certification. It will take work, but it will make networking very easy. After taking CCNA I found that I could do network design in my sleep. But again it depends on how much effort you put towards it, and how technical you are, naturally.
I would use the CISCO certification library and any other CISCO stuff (like their online training).

jeremy8529

I see, the only thing is I need a good back ground of multiple vendors as well, I know for a fact that the test to qualify, will one year have cisco on it, and the next, have little to no cisco. So Network+/CCNA?

matt79

yeah if you can do both that would be good. But the CCNA has more networking design information then network+. Network+ has a lot of stuff like domains, printers, users, groups and stuff. Remember the CCNA does not only fall under cisco products, the information holds true under most networks. It is just that you are taught how to configure the networks using cisco equipment. So you are still learning networking. If I had a novell router I could still design a network, I would just have to learn how to configure that brand of router. hope that helps.
If you have any questions you can feel free to email me at

operating27@gmail.com