Education : Rochester Institute of Technology
Degree : Bachelor of Science in Information Technology
Minor : Economics
GPA : 3.9

Outstanding Scholar Award Recipient - B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT
Awarded to a Graduating Senior in the college who excells in the college environment. Award is limited to the top 1% of students in the college.

Classes and Projects Completed

Internetworking II This class provided an in depth discussion of wireless networking, including 802.11, 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g proposed, wireless security, and antenna theory. Also, there was a section in this class about cable pulling to accompany a lab. Other advanced networking concepts were touched on, including VPNs. Weekly labs were completed and written up to display working knowledge of classroom material. Class included a timed practical in which the technologies must be demonstrated to a professor.
Systems Administration I and II These classes taught me a lot about Systems Administration. The first class dealt with administration of a system isolated from the outside world, with emphasis on UNIX and Windows NT/2000. This covered anything from detailed filesystem maintenance to installation to user and system management to scripting. The second class dealt with networked environments and the administration of larger systems. There was a strong emphasis on security. I studied many network services and performed weekly lab reports. The final project in this class was a practical in which I set up a mock company (from a computer point of view) and provided essential services. My project featured a DMZ and firewall configuration using a Squid proxy server. I also completed a paper on Exchange 2000 and provided a 30 minute presentation on the features and system administrators approach to that service.
Network Administration This class was extremely intensive and included a theoretical overview, along with laboratory experience, in DNS, DHCP, LDAP, NetBIOS, WINS, TCP/IP, and UDP. There were weekly lab projects and regular write ups for the lab which accompanied this class. In the lab, we carried out implementations of those network services in both Windows 2000 environments and Linux environments.
OS Scripting In this course, we learn how to write scripts in UNIX to accomplish tasks. The class taught a lot about the UNIX shells (bs and bash) and gave me a lot of experience in dealing with UNIX. There were 10 labs due during the course of the year, each with multiple scripting assignments. The last half of the class, which I have not completed yet, deals with AWK programming.
Routing and Switching This class provided an extensive look into how routing and switching works on a network. We studied STA, Cisco IOS, VLANs, Trunking, ICMP, RIP, OSPF, and BGP. Projects included weekly lab write ups for the experiments we would go through in the weekly labs to show how these protocols work.
Needs Assessment This class focussed on how to identify and address problems and discrepancies in a business or organization and resolve them in the best possible way. There was an emphasis on data gathering, which manifested in several projects. With a group, I did a frequency count study as well as survey project.
Technology Transfer In this course, I am studying the creation, adoption, and consequences of new technologies with an emphasis on how to effectively diffuse new technologies. The class is extremely useful and will help me appropriately deal with new technologies in a company. Major projects include a technology diffusion simulation.
Computer Concepts This course taught all the foundations of computer hardware and operating systems. It was very intensive and involved many small weekly projects, such as base conversions, processor analysis, system analysis, and hard drive analysis. The large final project called for me to design a certain computer system given a scenario and a budget. Components had to be selected, then priced out to the best available deal, and described technically to prove that they would all work together. Many tradeoffs had to be made. The deliverable was a 37 page recommendation.
Data Communication This was an intensive course that taught the inside and out of networking and data communication. Most of this class was preparation for Internetworking Lab the next quarter, where all the concepts learned would be experimented with in a lab. There was one large group project in which we produced a half hour presentation on networking applications: mainly FTP, Web Browsers, Instant Messengers, and Telnet. I was in charge of the Web Browsers part of the assignment, and I produced an extensive look at the evolution and functionality of Web Browsers today, including an evaluation of all the protocols supported in today's browser. Along with the group presentation, I had to submit my own technical paper and abstract on browsers which turned out to be very extensive.
Internetworking Lab This class involved hands-on labs every week in which we used a full networking lab complete with routers, switches, hubs, and a ton of NT and Apple systems. Each lab needed a pass grade in order to pass the course due to the importance of each of them. In these labs, I had the opportunity to set up full Ethernet networks, Token Ring networks, and AppleTalk networks. I experimented with different types of medium, but mostly 10baseT. I dealt with serial communications and created cables. Other experiments involved connecting different Layer 1 protocol networks together with routers, and making it all work. We experimented heavily with switches. We also set up dial-up networks using a modem pool and PBX with a server. A written project was due in which I wrote a technical abstract on the RFC (Request For Comment) document on FTP.
Multimedia and Web Design This class involved creating a web site based on a report we had to write. I did Steve Jobs. Projects 1 and 2 (accessible through he navigational tool) do not work... they are simply old versions of the project3. In this class I learned the use of Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Fireworks.
Digital Media This class teaches how to incorporate Digital Media into web sites. It involves learning Macromedia Director and its programming language, lingo, in order to produce shockwave movies. I have completed several shockwave projects. The projects are accessible through www.billknitter.com/movies.
Database This course studied both relational and object oriented database design. There were three main projects, one involved the use of access to create a relational database, another involved DBAPP and ErWin in creating relational and semantic object databases, and the final project involved the construction of SQL queries.
Human Factors In this course, we learned about the design of everyday things and drew comparisons to software design. The main project was a paper critically analyzing the design of a toothbrush. We also worked on many smaller group projects involving design and implementation.
Visual Basic These classes taught me the insides and outs of visual programming. I have had quite a bit of programming experience in C++ and Pascal before, so it was not too difficult for me. VBI involved 16 programs due throughout the trimester, some difficult and some novice. The programs started with simple interfaces and migrated through manipulation of arrays and use of drag-and-drop. VBII was much more difficult as far as projects go, and there were 7 programs due over the trimester, all of which build upon each other. The final project was an Auto Rental POS application which accessed access data bases, interacted with Microsoft Excel, used multiple Random and Sequential files, customized ActiveX controls, and object-oriented techniques.