[carlisle_]

If you want to be a linux admin you should be comfortable with the command line. You should be able to write a simple bash script without needing to look up too much. You should be able to configure a LAMP stack from scratch without much hassle (looking at documentation here totally recommended).

I personally think the best way you can get started is by using the command line for everything "work" related. When you're doing your projects for school you should be using vim (or emacs if that's your thing). When you're navigating directories or performing file operations you should just use the terminal. Using the command line effectively is such a critical component of being an admin, and it just takes practice to get good at it.

The fact your doing computer science is a huge leg up, because you'll have a good understanding of the fundamentals of computers. When you work with linux you very often need to know the underlying mechanics of whatever you're working with. This goes hand in hand with being able to troubleshoot - a huge component of being an admin. Let's say you're troubleshooting an i/o issue on a server. When certain operations are performed on a SQL database in high volumes you notice the server starts to chug and i/o is severely bottlenecked. You need to know things like whether the RAID is configured correctly, and what the most optimal settings are for your usage. You need to know to check the i/o scheduler and make sure that's appropriate for what you're doing. Some of this stuff you won't know out of college, but you'll work with all of it eventually and pick it up. What counts is that you don't need somebody to explain the super basic stuff, you will already understand most things at a fairly high level. You should be able to pick things up quicker as a result, and cover significantly more ground than somebody learning Linux whose never really worked with computers seriously.

Anyway, that's longer than I meant to type up but hopefully you get the gist of what I'm saying. I'm slightly inebriated so sorry if my wording/sentence structure is hard to follow!