Doing a PhD in humanities and enjoy it. I’ve recently really started to enjoy Linux, self hosting, and messing around with various lab stuff.
There are not as many sysadmin job these days because so many on-prem deployments have moved to the cloud. Consider becoming a cloud version of a sysadmin (whatever they’re calling it now…). Every platform offers lots of free learning resources and has a certification process.
If you want some actual useful skills for a business, learn some cloud.
Azure has a free tier for students that you can renew every year you are still a student.
Can’t hurt to know a thing or two there. Even if it is just to help move back on-premise
https://www.heise.de/en/news/IDC-Many-companies-want-partly-out-of-the-cloud-10001934.html
What I would do is get a lot of experience with a lot of different systems.
If you’re enjoying self hosting and setting stuff up, go to something like TurnKey Linux and download a handful of applications that you’re interested in using.
Spin up virtual servers on a proxmox server, install the turnkey Linux systems, and then learn how they work. Get ldap running on your home network. Set up an nginx reverse proxy and get a certificate so that you can go to a duckdns internal name spaces instead of IP addresses.
Find use cases for your home network system and then find how to make the systems you have available work for those use cases.
And for the love of god, find yourself a cheap Windows server license and virtualize one of those and integrate it into the mix.
Host a WordPress or Joomla on IIS, set up a pihole for your home DNS on Ubuntu server.
Run a jellyfin server and download a bunch of public domain movies to it.
Hello, find yourself some Kiwix images that you like and figure out how to get https and nginx names running on them.
The more you play around with the technology, the more you’ll find out what you like doing and what you don’t like doing and what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and that will help you understand where you fit and wear your talents lie.
Once you know that I’m sure you can put those talents to use for gainful employment.
2 years of help desk minimum
Find a VAR. listen to the needs of your partner, talk to the VAR and set up sales calls.
Get pricing. Find out if they offer multiple year discounts.
Set up a ticketing system.
Fix the VARs quotes and forward them to your partner, wait for approval.
Follow up in a week.
Follow up in 2 weeks, explain that the quotes expire.
Work late Friday night patching for a 0-day, missing out on date night.
Find out Broadcom bought your homes plumbing and pay 3x what it cost to install to use it for another year.
Your kid got a call from Microsoft and now you can’t access email, fix that ASAP.
