Quote Originally Posted by mitch View Post
For the cost of an ITT AS, you could get almost a full 4 year BS at a state school - or at least the same number of credits at a community college in Comp Sci classes.
This. ITT is incredibly expensive. It's privately owned. You can get 100% of MIT's courses online for free. That, naturally, won't give you a degree, but it has been my experience that companies prefer to hire people with skills rather than people with degrees. You could go through the MIT courses, and/or work to gain real world experience, while you're unemployed and then resume college courses via distance-learning or a local community college and save yourself a ton of money.

I'm not an IT network guy, but I know that the Cisco certifications are the most commonly sought in networking. Unlike unix administration or programming, I don't know of a cheap way to get hands-on experience with a bunch of real networking gear. eBaying an old cheap router and switch and building a development network would be one way to go, but not a great solution in your current circumstance.

You could start up 3 or 4 server instances at Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud at $0.10/hr, and configure them to run unix based emulators of network equipment. Learning iptables, packetfilter, haproxy. Anyway, random thoughts while I have my morning coffee, good luck.

H.