My Story

My carrier in IT started by accident. I was going to college not really sure where or what I wanted to do. At this point in time, I had never touched a computer and was pretty much afraid of them. A computer class was required for any degree, but I was putting this off until the end. I finally decided to take it. I fell in love with it my first day of class. I went home and purchased my first computer. It was a Gateway (yes in the cow box). After a little time, I had it up and running. We were all given a course syllabus of what assignments were needed to finish the class. One night after my second class I decided to jump a little ahead for the next class and I could not stop. In 3 weeks, I had completed all of the assignments for the entire semester. I asked the professor if I had to show up for the remaining classes. He said “yes”, and I said well “what am I going to work on”. He said he would teach me programming. I said, “what is programming”. He explained it to me, and I still really didn’t understand but said “sure sounds good”. He started teaching me Visual Basic. By the end of the semester, I had built a bunch of different programs.

At this point, I knew I wanted to do something with computers. Just like previously learning about this thing called programming, I figured the computer world had a lot of things I never heard of or didn’t know about. When came time to select classes I took anything and everything computer related. I took networking, databases, other programming classes…..anything that had CIS on it. The next semester a new class was introduced called “Into to Web Pages”. As you could guess I jumped on that one, having no real idea what this was. We learned HTML, JavaScript and photo manipulation. I loved how creative you could be with building a page, it felt like art.

While I was going to college, I worked at a big box store as a loss prevention associate. Think plain clothes person who catches shoplifters. Part of that job involved going to court and calling the police every time I would apprehend someone. I got to know some of the police officers because of this. One day one of the officers came into the store and told me the police department had an opening and I should apply. I said I wasn’t going to school to be a police officer, that I was going for computers. He said why else would I do this job. I said it worked with my school schedule. He said he had a friend who worked at a computer consulting company and they were growing and had openings. He said his friend could get me an interview. I said I had zero experience and don’t know much yet. He said well it would be good for interview experience and I agreed. Got together a pretty sorry resume and gave it to him the next day.

About two weeks later I got called for an interview. A week later I was getting interviewed for a position as an ASP developer. I had never heard of Active Server Pages before and my face told the interviewer the same message. He stopped the interview and said, “you have no idea what ASP is do you”. I said I didn’t. He said we are always looking for ASP developers so take my card and give me a call next year. I left that interview and drove right to Borders Books and went to the computer section to look for a book on ASP. I left the store with 3. I went home and read the first book and built a bunch of projects. The next day I had class. I went into class and asked the professor if he could show me some ASP. He said he never heard of it. This was one of those times in life where you have a fork in the road, and you need to pick a path that might feel wrong or uncomfortable stepping into the unknown. I felt I was going to college to learn and that learning would get me a job and my professor has never heard of this language. How was he helping me get this job? I sat in my seat for about a minute, got up and walked out the door. I decided that day that I wasn’t going to go back and just drop out.

I spent every waking minute studying and building things in ASP. I would read the books on lunch in my car while at work and stay up all night when I got home. Seven days later I called him back asking for an interview. He laughed and said, “no way you learned ASP in 7 days”. I said I don’t think you understand how much I want this job. He said “ok, but this time you will be interviewing with an MVP in ASP”. I had no idea what an MVP was, but I didn’t care, this job was mine. He said, “you will either get hired on the spot or you won’t and if you don’t, don’t call us back”. I said “deal”. I interviewed and got hired on the spot.