General tips

You do not always have to type in your password:

• Use SSH keys to authenticate yourself in login (search with google). 
• Remove the password prompt for sudo by using command visudo and appending /etc/sudoers file with a line "labrat ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL".

Using SSH keys is a generally good idea, but disabling the password prompt for sudo is not. However, in this course it makes sense because there are time constraints in the demos, and you are still required to use sudo in front of command that requires root privileges. Using root privileges when not needed is stupid and does not show understanding (e.g., doing the whole assigment with "sudo -s").

You can also skip writing the whole "ssh labrat@blah blah" command by taking advantage of the alias command (google) or a proper SSH config ("man ssh_config"  or check e.g. Ubuntu help). Particularly, consider writing a ~/.ssh/config file to avoid typing the port numbers manually.