When does school end for you?

Ah, private institutions. Hmm. I'm not sure if it depends on the professor either, my CISCO professor was the same for all 4 courses, and he's Cisco certified, etc. But wow, if you did that well just by paying attention (since you already knew a bit about programming), I don't think you'd have problems with networking. Because where as programming is like theories, networking is more like information gathered and making it 'work'. Just memorization and a collection of data, really. If you can program a language, then programming a router and a switch is easy. Seriously. Best of luck to you, dude!! Drop me a VM or PM once in a while and let me know how you're doing.