I think we're really approaching a discussion of operational knowledge vs. technical knowledge. The young intern (and the ones at the teaching hospital here really do look they're right out of high school last week) has a lot of knowlege, and it isn't just crammed into her head; it's organized, systematically and topically, else she never would have made it past the comprehensive exams.
Operational knowledge, acquired from experience, sets up non-academic linkages among the knowledge sets. Those linkages are empirical, and are thus never quite the same from one individual to the next. One reason interns get exposed to all the various rotations is to ensure they get a wide variety of opportunities to make new linkages (under supervision, for the patient's sake). That's also a reason to work them such long hours (as well as to ensure they can act reasonably under stress -- and "reasonably" has a very high accuracy component in medicine). We have not applied these principles in IT, or in the networking subdiscipline of IT. I doubt we could without a major shift in underlying knowledge required to be demonstrated before anyone is supervised as a network intern. It would probably take a major network disaster before such a system would be called for -- and I, for one, would rather avoid that if possible. The clean up afterwards is too big a pain. Annlee Howard replied to Carroll, et al: major snip-- > > Cisco, I believe, really needs to soul-search if knowing every > obscure knob is really useful. When I do complex network design, I > decide what I want to accomplish -- often that's more from reading of > RFCs, professional group participation, etc. -- and THEN look up the > commands. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=71709&t=71143 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]