My name is Zak Wachtendonk and I have been involved in web page design in some form since I was a sophmore in high school due to a special program that was started at La Follette HS. It was through that program that I was taught my first HTML using just notepad at the time. During my junior and senior years I took more programming classes that were offered in Basic (yes Basic) and Pascal.
When it came time for college I knew that I wanted to do something with computers but I did’nt think I had the skills to be a programmer so I enrolled in the CIS – Operations program here at MATC in 1997. After three years I graduated from the program and began to look for work and found that there was none! I learned during my internship at the UW Doits that the job can be pretty easy, so most operators stay in their positions for many years.
Eventually I came back to MATC and took courses twords certificates in PC Troubleshooting, MS Office, and Website Design. Then in 2003 I found out about the Web Analyst Programmer degree and it’s exactly what I was looking for educational wise.
I have been here at MATC nearly a decade and I know they are anxious to get rid of me so heres to hoping!
January 22, 2007 at 4:04 am
The IT instructors are probably not anxious to get rid of you but I do know that they really care about whether we get jobs. I think that in IT it is good to continuously train so I imagine that I’ll be back at MATC to take classes even after I am employed. I still want to take C sharp and the LAMP open source certificate program courses eventually…but that requires funding(i.e. get job first) Julie
January 23, 2007 at 4:56 am
Ha! They don’t want to get rid of you, think of all the money they’ve made! In all seriousness, the more education you have the more well-rounded of an employee you will be. To make yourself more marketable, I suggest getting involved with an Open Source project or two and start building that resume!