Ask HN: Reccomendations for adult study in IT (SF bay area)

2 points by pjd7 ↗ HN
Hi HN,<p>I was wondering if you could provide some suggestions to a 30 year old sysadmin team lead who wants to gain a university based education in a related field (part-time)?<p>I currently do not hold any formal IT based qualifications (pending graduation of a diploma in network engineering from Tafe NSW Australia). I have over 12 years experience and work history that got me a work visa in the USA.<p>The ideal course would cover a moderate amount of programing / software development units, management units & project management. Any sysadmin type units would be nice too as they would hopefully get me some easier credits.<p>Ideally I would like to be able to complete the course work online, however a local presence in the SF bay area would be great for when I am stuck on some course work or want to get into a different environment to focus on my studies.<p>Can anyone recommend a "good" education provider with course/s that meets my needs that is not going to cost over a 50k USD?

3 comments

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Two questions:

1. What do you want to learn? Sysadmin stuff? Software development? Something else?

2. Is your goal pure "learning", or is your goal to get some kind of degree/certification to put on your CV?

I think I want something along the lines of:

1: I would prefer a mix of management/project management with software engineering. I am not great at maths so I would like to avoid a course heavy on stats and discrete math for example.

Hopefully the outcome of this is to give me options to progress down the management track further. But also give me a reasonable option to move into software development should I want to.

2: Degree/certification to put on my CV. While also still having enough of a basis in software engineering to develop reasonable intermediate programing skills and to keep me interested in the course work.

In that case I'm not sure. But since we're on HN: Start a side project and make a business out of it. That way you'll get both engineering and business management skills ;)