Network Engineer, 7 Years, and so on

Okay, so to wrap up the whole "How to be a Network Engineer" thing, I'll make a short post.

I ended up moving from being a vendor to being a client. I was The IT Guy for a county-wide library. I had routers and switches and servers. Some of the servers were big Suns. Very fun! I learned a lot there and was very free to explore and build things.

After I was divorced and had settled down some, I decided that it was time to get out of the small town that I had lived in and go to the big city. I was already living there, so it made sense to get a job there.

I did a ~1 year stint at a law firm as The IT Guy. Gone was the freedom of the library, instead I was always being bossed around by shallow, mean, bitchy lawyers all day. It was a Catch 22 situation, and I was not psychologically healthy enough to stand up for myself and define boundaries in that environment. I quit. But I had acquired some training on SQL and gotten comfortable writing database queries and getting around on a database server.

While at the law firm, I had started exploring a Big Ten college campus next to my neighborhood, and took a night class in calculus. It was very hard but a very cool environment.

I took a job at a dry cleaner's, and set about going to school full time to study engineering. I had an Associate degree in electronics at the time. A few weeks later I got a student IT job at the university and was all set to pursue my undergrad degree.

After a year, the guys in the networking department that I hung out with had an opening for me, and I moved over there as a student employee. My new job was to set up Linux servers, work on web and automation scripts, and configure Cisco equipment. Big time real world networking experience! It was a joy.

I learned PHP, Perl, Java, and got more experience with C, C++, bash, SQL.

After a year of that, you can see where this is going. I got a new boss who used to work for an ISP, a state-wide ISP funded by education. I was made an offer and became, yes, a Network Engineer. In only 7 years :)

I am still a senior in Electrical Engineering at the university, but I have not taken any classes since I got my position. We'll see what happens.

Now I work on Cisco, Juniper, SMC, Force 10, and lots of networking equipment. We use BSD servers to do our work. It's not quite the fun and free environment the university was, but it's pretty cool. And now I actually control the internet bandwidth for that Big Ten university, and most of the others in the state :)