RECAP - Fall 2025 Annual Subnetting Workshop
Netsoc's Annual Fall 2025 Subnetting Workshop had one of the largest turnouts to date, teaching students one of the most difficult but fundamentally important topics taught in Computer Networking - Subnetting! Netsoc's Chief Operations Officer, Aidan Waddell, alongside his associate, Keegan Gratton, taught the students what subnetting was, the practical applications of subnetting, and how to properly find the key components of a subnet, giving the first and second year students lots of practice followed by pizza and popcorn while they rattled their brains around converting from decimal to binary! The number of people that the event attracted from the Networking & IT Security program even resulted in an announcement from one of FBIT's Program Directors and the Student Learning Support Managers, Amanda Macearharn-Gaudet and Sarah Stokes, about the resources that the Networking & IT students could use to their advantage to help aid them in their learning endeavors surrounding difficult topics such as subnetting!
This was followed by the second portion of the workshop which was covered by Netsoc's Associate Communications Officer, Haneen Al-Musowi, who taught the students VLSM (variable length subnet masking), a concept that builds off of the fundamentals of subnetting and takes it a step further by showing how to efficiently use the IP address spaces in subnetting! Not only did she eloquently break down what VLSM was in a methodical and digestible way, she also covered a topic that many of the first-year students would be covering on their final Introduction to Networking 1 exam at the end of the semester!
Near the end, many students left the workshop commenting about how much easier the topic of subnetting felt, and how much more confident they were with their approach to it! Going forwards, we hope to create more workshops to help students understand these difficult concepts taught in the curriculum, and we hope to create more workshops and educational content to benefit them as they continue through their degree!