If your college prof is hinting you should stay with Fedora, stay with Fedora
. Mine do the same thing all the time. Profs tend to hint like that a lot. I've learned to listen to them. When your doing an assignment and something won't work until you realize you're running a different OS you'll be pretty mad.
The two closest distros to Fedora are Ubuntu 8 and SuSE 10. SuSE 11 got quite the overhaul is pretty different now. Looks the same but underneath it's much more complex.