Fundamentals of Computer Networks

Networks are about getting bits from one machine to another reliably across messy, heterogeneous infrastructure, and this course teaches you the layered abstraction (OSI/TCP/IP) that makes that tractable — what each layer promises, what protocol does the work, and where the boundaries actually leak. You'll spend the semester inside Cisco's CCNA 1 curriculum: configuring IOS on switches and routers, subnetting IPv4 by hand, working with IPv6, and verifying connectivity with the same tools network engineers use, capped by the online CCNA 1 final alongside the course final. As a sophomore CTIS requirement it's the prerequisite mental model for everything later that assumes "the network just works" — server admin, security, distributed systems — and the subnetting and packet-tracing fluency you build here is what those courses quietly rely on.