I went to the Chubb Institute. My class was for "Web development and Business Programming". I know it is not a credited course or worth anything to most people, but for what it's worth, I finished at the top of my class with a 4.0. We were taught HTML, Javascript, Visual Basic, SQL (Oracle Database) and finally Java. The most important lesson I learned from that school was the basic concepts of programming and problem solving skills. I was taught that no matter the language, the problems are almost always the same, you just need to learn the syntax.

When I graduated, the school helped me find a job. The job was in IT, but it was for a help desk position at a call center and not computer programming. I took the job anyway and worked this position for over a year until I was finally offered a position in the companies programming department, but only because I constantly showed interest. I worked in the programming department using FoxPro and a few other older languages. To get the position I told them I was familiar with the technologies, which was a lie. I learned the languages as fast as I could on my own. I stayed here for another 2 years until everyone found out that the company was soon to go under.

By chance, another graduate of Chubb landed a job at a software development company as a tester and they were looking for someone who was good with HTML, Javascript, Java and knew Oracle database. This seemed like the perfect position for me because of the schooling but it had been so long since I used any of these technologies that I really forgot how to use them. I had only a few days before the interview so I opened up my old Chubb books and used them to relearn what I had forgotten. The interview went well and I got the job on a trial basis. 6 years later and I am the Senior Software Engineer for this same company. We try to stay on top of new technology which always keeps thing fresh, interesting and fun for me.

In the 6 years I worked here I was also able to start to my own side business. I created several websites which used my own content management system that I developed using PHP and MySQL. I was eventually able to sell my CMS to many other webmasters in the industry and made a good deal of money doing it.

Some personal tragedy occurred in the past few years which caused me to loose my business, but, I was able to maintain and keep my job. Things are going well now and I am preparing to launch a new website and am in the process of creating my own video game, written in Java, not a Minecraft ripoff ;).

The point of my story is that I achieved a great deal, in my opinion, with a piece of shit, worthless piece of paper from a no name technical school. I believe I was able to take what they taught me and turn it into a career and most certainly a stable future. Of course, I have worked very hard over the past 10 years to get where I am. The school does not promise a bright future, that is up to you.