I understand the choice is a personal decision, etc, etc. I'm only looking for resources to help me make my decision.
Any input is greatly appreciated.
Though, I would also recommend at least reading and watching through the certification material for CCNA, CCNP and CCIE Routing & Switching, Security, Collaboration and Datacenter when you have a chance from something like Safaribooksonline or Udemy. The amount of knowledge you learn just by reading through the certification material and applying it is breathtaking.
To enhance your experience, I also recommend picking up a CCNA/CCNP lab kit off of Amazon so you have something cheap at home to put your hands on. If you do not have the money or do not want to have equipment in house there are online lab options that use real equipment that you can remote into from home. Though with that option you will not get the good hands on experience learning about all the different cable types, how to configure them properly on the routers, and switches and go through the good old troubleshooting process when cables do not work as expected that you will run into on a real network engineering job.
All of the best network engineers I have met have their own network lab setup at home or were lucky and had a test network setup at work to prototype and test things before implementing them in their staging and production environments at work.
Once you have a good grasp of physical networking and the configuration of network hardware you can really start to take advantage of software defined networking to automate all types of network designs and security requirements. This will give you a major advantage over other candidates if the program has varying types of equipment to learn on.