NetAcademy E-Newsletter Mexico

The first time I heard about a certification program for Universities was inside an elevator in a very nice Hotel, where I met Lisa Streeter, Program Manager of the Cisco Program in Latin America. Until then, I had never even heard the name of the program. When it was presented in México in September 99, it had no impact and only few universities adopted it.

The reason of my visit was to learn about the program to assess the feasibility of implementing it in our university. A lot of students would benefit with the integration of this program to our curriculum: They would be part of the largest e-Learning program in the world, the program included training sessions for Instructors, theoretic and hands-on activities, and quality control schemes, among other things. But what really caught my attention was that, though Cisco Systems is a Telecommunications and Communication Technologies company, the program is based on standards and important topics like the OSI model, cabling schemes, routing, IP addressing, subnets, access lists and so on. Topics like these are presented in such a way that the students really learn. The concepts are integrated as a ladder, where every step represents a well-founded knowledge. From my point of view and my experiences as a degree and master degree student, this program has a different approach; if I give the program to a sales representative, he would tell me that the product sells for itself.

As for the Mexican Universities, this program really updates our teachers and leads the students to a competitive world. The program embraces a lot of added values, for example, the ability to prepare teachers and students to present the CCNA certification exam. "But, what is a CCNA?" I will quote what happened to me while I was writing this editorial: "I opened my Internet browser and searched for CCNA in the T1msn page, as a result I got 25 documents, and 15 were Universities' pages".

Many Mexican Universities who adopted the program, did so thanks to their visionary and proactive personnel, that also had a great sense of responsibility, since educating is a great responsibility, but to educate with high quality requires additional efforts. For some people this could be marketing, for others a treasure full of knowledge that allows us to offer added values to our students, and this conveys with the saying of the Rector, Lic. Jesús Lavin Santos del Prado, "Our University's reason of being".

After 3 years of experience in the Tamaulipas Autonomous University, with a lot of pride I can see that this program is growing in different academic areas. I know this has been a shared task between Cisco Systems' Personnel, specially Verónica Tostado, Isaac Majerowicz, Help Desk staff: Erika, Nelly, Daniela, Rodrigo, Carlos, Daniel and University's staff, who have trusted me to establish new challenges and guidelines. While t is certainly true that the CCNA certification is a very important project and the skills acquired are very useful for people with degrees in Information technologies or Systems Engineering, as well as for every information technologies' related technical studies, the CCNP is perfect for university students to go on with the technological education, using the same method, but involving more knowledge and modern infrastructure.

I recently had the opportunity to attend to the fifth semester of the program, and from here I want to greet my friends in Dominican Republic and Equator. In this semester I am adopting new concepts, techniques, experiences and most of all, great satisfaction. I really think that for all those Technology and Communications lovers, this program will be very useful and we will be able to share knowledge. I want to thank everyone that directly or indirectly trusted me to be the main promoter of this new project. I know this is a big responsibility, but my willing to do it is bigger. The confidence and support of my family to accomplish new challenges is very important and priceless. If someone asks me about my behavior, I would say I owe it to my parents, thanks for teaching me values, for being an example of perseverance.

CCNA is an important step program … build your own ladder ... and build it as high as you want to get ... getting to the top is up to you, and you set the time and space to do it.

M.C. Everardo Huerta
CATC México, Tamaulipas Autonomous University.

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