I actually learned something!

themagicone

I've been studying for CCNA now for about 6-8 weeks. I'm aiming to take my test next week. Anyways, in my house I have a Linksys branded Cisco Switch. It would be considered "Cisco Small Business". I've always had the issue where it would take forever for computers to get online after turning on or waking up. I kept thinking it was a DHCP issue but was never able to resolve the issue. Well I was studying STP last night and it hit me - my switch had STP on by default and the ports would have to go through the whole process of turning on every time. STP takes around 50 to 70 seconds to go from blocking to forwarding. And right there was my delay in getting online. Turned STP off as I didn't need it and everything has increased in speed.

Feels good when you actually learned something from hours and hours of studying.

alan2308

Yes, it's definitely nice to be able to put the information into use as opposed to say a Humanities class where I spend the entire semester wondering why anyone would ever need to know this.

AD227529

Ah, Humanities class. Without a doubt the most worthless class I ever took in college, along with Sociology. I remember one of our assignments was to go to the art gallery, look at a few paintings, and then write an essay on what we thought the artist was trying to say through their paintings. I remember thinking, "OK, how is this going to help me get a job?" At least they taught me something in my networking classes that I actually use. Not knocking college, but a lot of college classes are just worthless and nothing but "filler classes".

themagicone

The only reason I'm going to WGU is for the damn piece of paper. College is a waste of time and money but without it you're limited in what kind of job and pay you get.

Panzer919

themagicone wrote: »

The only reason I'm going to WGU is for the damn piece of paper. College is a waste of time and money but without it you're limited in what kind of job and pay you get.

I know this is debatable but I think in the IT industry (at least here in Cincinnati its held true), my college degree has earned me less job opportunities than my certifications and job experience. I think a degree is necessary for SOME aspects of IT, like management, but its been my experience that in networking it's more about certs, experience and social networking.

Like I said in the beginning, it's very debatable, just my .02$

back to your original post, it's always a great feeling once you figure something out like that. In the future that will be one thing you will learn to check often since it took you some time to learn it.

MrRyte

Ya know; I've always wondered who comes up with the curriculum for some of these degree programs, especially the arts, humanities, philosophy and other abstract classes that do little else but kill time with pointless debates. Do they actually have a way to measure how these type of classes affect or improves the student either short or long term?

That said; the only type of "filler" class I'll take is music theory and notation since I'm learning to play guitar.

Slowhand

Didn't we do this "why should I go to college" song and dance before?

j-man

Isn't it great to use knowledge to solve a problem?

I'm not new to networking but it was because of my studying for the CCNA I was able to troubleshoot a problem when I installed a Cisco small business switch in with the existing HP and 3COM ones. It took a minute of head scratching to figure out what was wrong but the prep for CCNA allowed me to pinpoint the exact problem and recover from it. There have been at least three times I've been able to quickly troubleshoot and fix an issue because of studying for this exam.

To quote the late, great Emil Faber: "Knowledge is good"

TesseracT

pffft... you learned something useful in real life troubleshooting. Must be doing something wrong