You Can Be Anything › All careers › Engineering & Technology
Network Engineer
Designs, implements, and maintains computer networks that connect the world.
Did you know?
About 99% of the data crossing the oceans travels through undersea cables lying on the sea floor, not via satellites.
How subjects help
- Computer Science: Set up routers and rules that send data to the right computer across the internet.
- Mathematics: Use binary numbers to split a network into address ranges so every device has its own.
- Physics: Understand how signals travel through copper, glass fibre and radio waves and why they fade.
A famous name
Vint Cerf: Co-designed TCP/IP, the rules computers use to talk over the internet; called a father of the internet.
Try it yourself: Catch a flipped coin like a network does
- Lay 16 coins in a 4 by 4 square, heads or tails at random.
- Add a fifth coin to the end of each row and the bottom of each column so every row and column has an even number of heads. Add one in the corner too. This is your "parity" check.
- Turn away while your helper flips just one coin.
- Turn back and find the row and the column that now have an odd number of heads. The flipped coin is where they cross.
- Swap and let your helper try, then try a bigger grid.
Network and telecoms engineers rely on extra check bits like these, so that when data is damaged on its way across a network the error can be spotted and often fixed.
Adapted from CS Unplugged (University of Canterbury): Parity magic.
Also try: Pass a message through a network.
Known for it in
USA, UK, Singapore, Germany, Japan