Will a bachelor’s degree and RHCSA be enough to consistently get interviews?

You may also want to consider data-center operations or infrastructure support roles as a bridge into larger engineering positions. They can provide real-world Linux experience with hardware, vendors, automation, networking, storage, and large-scale deployments. A degree teaches useful fundamentals, but operational work often comes down to being able to investigate messy failures and figure out how systems behave in production. There isn’t really a credential for that, so practical projects and concrete examples matter.

Don’t rely on generic programming certifications, especially ones that simply claim you know Python. Certifications are most useful when they match the job and validate a platform employers actually use. Finish the degree if it’s practical, pursue RHCSA if you want Linux roles, and spend the rest of your time building evidence around automation, cloud, containers, and infrastructure-as-code. Also be straightforward about your education status; misrepresenting a degree can cause serious problems during verification.

If you’re already close to finishing the bachelor’s degree, completing it is probably worthwhile because it will remove a common hiring filter. RHCSA can complement it, especially for Linux-oriented roles, though some employers may value RHCE more for automation-heavy positions. Neither credential replaces hands-on experience, so use your existing programming background as the differentiator rather than presenting yourself as an entry-level administrator.

Experience generally matters more than certifications in infrastructure work. RHCSA is a useful foundation, but the market often expects practical skills with tools such as Ansible, cloud platforms, containers, Kubernetes or OpenShift, virtualization, networking, storage, Bash, APIs, and troubleshooting across an entire stack. Build a small lab or portfolio that demonstrates automation and operational problem-solving. Being able to show what you deployed and how you diagnosed failures will usually carry more weight than collecting certificates.

A degree and RHCSA should help you get past more automated screening, but they won’t guarantee interviews by themselves. Your decade of programming and research experience could be much more valuable if you target roles that actually use it, such as DevOps, platform engineering, infrastructure automation, or data-focused engineering. Tailor your résumé to each role instead of applying broadly to every system administrator opening, and clearly describe your individual contributions, tools, and results. Your patents and published paper are absolutely worth including if you explain what you personally built or solved.