Thank you both for your replies, they were extremely informative.

@ thehorse13: Lol this is gonna be long, but here goes...

I graduated June 2005. The way my high school was setup was you had to be full time for your freshman year. Once you hit your sophomore year (10) you had the choice to either remain full time or do half a day at a technical school. At that time I was only just getting into computers, and knew nothing about networking. The instrcutor at the tech school was a former sales engineer from Cisco and had also worked at Network General, a very cerebral person.

In any case, I remember being heavily interested in the course work, i.e. learning how the various routing protocols worked, how data is converted into segments, packets, frames, and bits, and how each layer of the OSI worked together to deliver data. Lol I was actually so interested I slacked off on my normal school work to read up on technology and networking, but I still passed thankfully

So I completed all four semesters in about a year and obtained my CCNA. I still had two years left in tech school so I decided to help take the load off my teacher (he was teaching, managing the network, and troubleshooting problems) a bit and setup a little help desk system where teachers could submit tickets if they were having issues. We also used this a little for outsiders as well for donations. This actually turned into my senior project.

At my tech school we have a committee called the OAC (Occupational Advisory Committee). Its composed of several members who currently work in the industry, and we all meet three times a year to review the course curriculum, discuss trends in the industry, and see how we can better prepare students for work in the IT field. It's worked out well so far, and this is where I've met all of my current contacts from various companies such as Network General, Panduit, Cisco, Netex, CNI, etc..

It was at this meeting in August of 2005 where I got my hook into the company I'm at now. At that time I was doing first shifts at a Wawa (never ever work at these places, I've never seen people so ticked over a meatball before ). My teacher bragged about me a good bit which led to talking and eventually an invite to talk furthur about my future. And now here I am, with a Juniper cert added.

Sheesh, sounds like I was writing a biography...but thats my story. Took a lot of hard work to get here though, and now I'm looking at my B.S. in Computer Science as well as all my technical certs...not enough time in a day

Unfortunately, as good as things may sound for me, this place sucks to work at. Very political, old fashioned, thankless, and a sweat shop...over worked and underpaid. We've had a lot of people leave in the past few months for better jobs, tired of all the bs they have to put up with here. But so it goes I guess

Lol this ends my long post. Thanks for replies and your interest thehorse13, hopefully we'll talk again.

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