In a perfect world I guess your professor is correct.
When my company sits down to hire and all the talk from the applicant is around a cert we generally take note that you don't have any real knowledge that would help support our environment. We also have 3 separate test scenarios used to judge applicants. We've had to crack down like this because too many people take exams and can't backup their book knowledge in the real world.
FWIW I'm a Network Engineer and I have passed plenty of Cisco certs.
EDIT: Congrats by the way
Sign me up for an interview. A company that doesn't rely on certs as their key to knowledge and hiring. That is one thing that ERKS me to no end. All of these companies that I interview for, they don't take the time to see if you actually have the knowledge. They see that someone has a cert, they hire them on the spot.
I have CCNA, A+, and MCSE under my belt, + linux, I don't have the certs now because I can't afford it, and when I go into a place to interview for a job, I get turned down because I don't have a slip of paper, but some joe shcmo comes in with a cert he bought his way to, and he gets the job, of course the guy has no real hands on experience or anything like that.
The last IT job I was working at, I was replaced by some doofus that didn't know his **** from his hands. This was all because he had a certification, they thought that he was more determined and that he had proof of knowledge, even though I was manning the servers, I was the whole reason they were up and running. They hosted an ISP and websites and I was the heart behind it all.
I worked with the dude for a week and he knew nothing at all. I just hate it when companies think a slip of paper makes a world of difference, like it symbolizes that you know what you're talking about, some cases it's true, but I find that there are more times where people just pay for it and they have no knowledge except what was written in their book, or they read cram sheets.
I think it's cool that a company would actually TEST someones knowledge before hiring, completely ignoring the cert.