@hj one thing they didn't teach me was BGP. "It's for the big ISPs and carrier networks, you won't need it in your job"

Well, they were wrong for multiple reasons (hello iBGP my little magic load balancing friend) and I worked at an ISP.

The really difficult part though is getting your hands on the gear. I picked my school because I was a dumb poor little boy and I was amazed they had a Cisco router in our lab that was worth like $200k. That's peanuts these days, but it gave me access to something I could never afford to touch on my own.