Internship: Am I on the right track?

elderkai

Hey guys. It's been awhile.

The past week has been hectic with scheduling between two schools, a university and vocational while belonging to the public school system. Things finally settled today, though, so I decide to make a post to get some different perspectives.

To start out, I'm 17 and in my senior year. I was accepted into a collaborative program at the state university where I am taking college core classes as well as highschool for dual-credits. While awesome, I also wanted a way to make myself as marketable out of highschool. I passed the CCNA in June, but I know that while the CCNA is a great start, I wanted more. The vocational school I attended last year(core classes and vocation) has a networking internship now. I was able to get it worked out so I can go to it two afternoons and one full school day a week, which is I think 15 hours, which fits perfectly around my schedule at the university.

This internship is on and off at the actual school. For the first couple weeks I only go there, but soon the teacher will be sourcing us to other companies as interns. A promising one is looking like an ISP for businesses.

My real question is this: Am I heading the right direction? And if so, does anyone have any suggestions as to what skills I should get under my belt in addition to make my life easier? Should I study for the CCNP topics or should I get fluent at a simple language just to be able to write quick little scripts that might be useful later? Any help would be appreciated and hopefully I was clear enough.

lantech

An intership is a good way to get experience. Especially at an ISP depending on what you'll be doing there.

What do the other internship positions look like?

ptilsen

What exactly do you want to do? Networking? What's the university degree in?

elderkai

Networking. It's just core classes.

matt333

Internships are great. I enjoyed my internships a lot and I definitely wouldn't be where I am now without them. Even if its only a few hours a week DO IT!
I think your doing great, in high school and have certifications is way ahead of the game. I think you should go for MS certs because early in your career I feel like you need to have a more general understand of the infrastructure AKA the servers not just routers/switches IMO. Maybe go for the MCSA:2008, something like the CCNP while good will limit you because entry-level jobs are not normally networking focused

ptilsen

Take the internship for sure, and start looking for a PT job if you have the capacity for it. Experience is huge. Coming out of a four-year program at 21 or 22 with 3-4 years of experience, a degree, and certs will be awesome. I didn't pursue a real college degree at 17, but I did get some entry level certs and a full-time job. While I wish I had the degree, I can tell you no degree would have brought the success the seven years I spent not pursuing one did. If you can get CCNP and whatever other certs are of interest to you as well, that's even better.

I would say take your time on CCNP. Might as well wait till you're at least a year or two into CCNA, since CCNP will extend it. As matt333 said, it would be good to gain more general infrastructure knowledge. Look at A+, Security+, Microsoft and Linux certs if you have the capacity.

All that being said, if I could go back, I might actually go for a CS degree and not go into infrastructure. Networking is great and so are other infrastructure fields, but put some serious consideration into computer science. It's really hard to go wrong with a CS degree, even if you stay in networking.

Kasor

Internship lead to experience and get you a job. Of course a CS or IS degree will help. I prefer my guy to have a degree on CS/IS, than those fancy degree on IT Security/Networking. A tradition degree on CS/IS will help you in long term in IT Field.

glenn_33

I wish I was where you are 10 years ago. You're off to a really good start in my opinion. Think about where you'll be when you're 30. You should have a lot of experience by then.

YFZblu

Agreed - Great start, I wish I knew what I wanted at age 17.

astrogeek

I think you've already done a great deal in making yourself markitable by what you've accomplished already. Your only 17 and already have a CCNA and are in an internship gaining valuable IT experience - when I was 17 I was still farting around barely taking high school seriously. You're definitely on a path I wish I had taken!

I think becoming an MCSE would be a great way to really round out your skill set, a lot of jobs I see ask for that. Even if you aren't in charge of managing the servers, if you are the network person it is good to have a solid understanding of what is running on your network. I also think learning scripting is a valuable skill as well, this is something I'd like to learn more myself.

Don't forget to create a LinkedIn account. You should be capturing all of this experience in your profile and connecting with your classmates and teachers and getting recommendations for work you're doing for others. All of that will greatly help you better market yourself to any potential employer. I'm a bit new on LinkedIn but there's a lot of great useful features and articles I've found there that you should take advantage of.

snokerpoker

First off, I'd like to congratulate you for being so focused at a young age. You are definitely on the right track with the internship. Like others have said, I agree you should get some M$ certs under your belt and work on getting Linkedin set up so you can begin networking with other professionals in your area.

elderkai

Thanks for the encouraging words. ^.^ Ideally, working in a *nix environment would be better to me than a windows one. I imagine it'd still be worth going through the curriculum for the MCSE path, though, and seeing if I have the funds to take it at that point.

ptilsen

Honestly, if you already know you don't want to work heavily with Windows, don't waste your time and money. Few networking or non-Windows professionals in general find a lack of Microsoft certifications as a serious career dampener. Heck, my own Microsoft certifications have always been very modest compared to my skill and experience level, and that has never hurt my career progression as a Microsoft-centered IT professional -- at least, not much. I'm not saying they don't have a lot of value; I'm just saying there are probably better uses of your time. If you're dead-set on networking, focus on that. Linux, scripting, security, and programming would be better auxiliary focuses if you know you don't want to work on Windows.