Hi, all. I am a Computer Science student but I realised that what I have learnt from lectures are mostly theories. I just wonder what are the actuall skills(programming languages, server maintainance, etc) I had better learn now to prepare myself if I want to enter the IT industries when I graduate a few years later. I am quite interested in networking, sys admin and operating system.

I wanted to put up a poll but I don't even know what options do I have.... so any comments are welcome

Thanks.

As your first language, I would suggest some of these...

Kashmiri
Hindi
Urdu
Assamese
Punjabi
Bengali
Gujarati
Marathi
Oriya
Konkani
Kannada
Malayalam
Tamil
Telugu

(Sorry, couldn't resist).

EDIT:

You can't think years ahead in IT. I would suggest you get a good grounding in as much as possible - learn principles, not specifics. If you learn how to program properly then, to a great degree, the language you actually use is irrelevent - they all do the same thing and more often than in a very similar way.

I can completely confirm what slyman wrote.
try to find out the priciples and general methods.
Whenever I solved a tricky problem, I always take some minutes to answer these questions afterwards:
What was unique in this problem? What confused me most? Why?
Why did it take so much time to find the right approach?

Knowledge about oneself ist as important as knowledge about computing stuff...
Even an expert "cooks with nothing but water" (as we say in Germany). In comparison with an advanced engineer, he is just more familiar in solving problems that he never encountered before.

as to networking:
learn TCP/IP in depth. it's the base. once you have completely understood it, then you will know the priciples of how a networking protocol works. Then it's easy to learn sthing about different protocols.
Best way to learn it (that's how I did it): take a good tutorial/book, take a TCP/IP trace, and try to find out how it works.

Get internships so you gain experience... being a System Admin now, that is the best thing to have is simply experience.

Social and communication skills. The image of the anti-social geek with no graces whatsoever is obsolete today. The ability to get your ideas and opinions across to normal, non-tech business people is something that is getting more and more important in IT today.

Try and get as much troubleshooting experience as you can (without specialising) of both hard and software, combining this with your TCP/IP knowledge will certainly stand you in good stead as a sys admin.

If you decide to take th emanagement route.. the most important thing you will ever need to know is....

Take an e-mail, click on forward.. type in the Distribution List of the team you manage, in the body type in "FYI..." without the quotes of course. Then click the send button

If you can tackle the above skill and use it agressivly and defensivly.. you will make it big in the IT industry. We are talking 6 digit salaries. good luck!

Thanks
Trey

One word. Patience. Or is that patents? :-) No, no, it really is patience. Patents are for fools.

Ok, thank you guys! Now I feel so energized after reading your advices
I always think IT professionals are the coolest guys around

Thanks.

I would say,

learn as much of the fundamentals as possible, learn both unix, and windows basics. along with the basics of each in programming practices. this will help you weather you become sysadmin or programmer. I know lot of guys who are hard core Unix but know very little of Windows and the other way arround is true too. guys that know some of each are more rounded. and more useful.

hope that helped.


-Nex6