Having been one of the top students in my high school class, I got a full scholarship to college (don’t worry though, Valerie has racked up enough loans for both of us in law school). I attended  Umass Dartmouth college and majored in Computer and Information Science. Having realized early on that being an architect was not something I wanted to spend my life doing, I changed directions and immersed myself in 1′s and 0′s for five years. Five long, difficult years. I was now working as in graphic design for a company called Vanson Leathers. It was a cool job, making logos and designs out of leather, but the guy who ran the place had a couple of screws loose and squeezed all he could out of my $8.00/hour.

But it wasn’t long before I (again) got involved in the co-op program through Umass, and somehow landing a sweet job for a little fortune 500 company called EMC2. I’m still not sure how I landed such a sweet job. I never applied for it, I didn’t even know who EMC was when their HR department called and asked me to come in for an interview. I went through a nerveracking full day of interviews with different people, completely brain dead by the end of the day and thinking there was no way they would hire me. In another string of fortunate events, I got a call a few days later and was offered the position. I couldn’t believe how much money they were offering me as a mere intern, and I almost fell on the floor when I heard it.

Aside from having possibly the longest high school name in the history of high school, Dimanregionalvocationaltechnicalhighschool was, as the name implies, a vocational (or “technical”) high school. That means that we studied a technical trade in addition to traditional academics.  It was a pretty sweet deal: alternating two weeks of boring academics, and two weeks of “shop”. I was in Drafting shop, which to most high school students would be a total snooze fest, but I enjoyed it, and I was good at it. In Junior year, those  ”two weeks of shop” turned into “two weeks of work”. Instead of going to school, I went and worked at a civil engineering firm drafting structural engineering plans. Having previously worked at Wal Mart (where I met my darling Valerie) this was a cool job at first, but I quickly found that I despised what I was doing, and decided on a new career direction when I entered college.

Val and I bought our first home back in December of ‘08, moved an hour away from all our friends and family, and still to this day get harassed about how we don’t visit back home often enough (you know, because roads only go one way). I’m now a successful software engineer, internet marketer, and self proclaimed “Entrepreneur”. I currently work a “9 to 5″ job at a great company called EMC. While most people would probably kill for my job, I have bigger goals than just being a run of the mill software engineer. I’d like to be completely working for myself sometime in the next five years.

Since 2008 I have been making extra income with some side projects involving internet marketing. Since then I have developed a software product, run a network of niche blogs, done lead generation with social media, and even had my hand in building a CPA network. My long term goal is to build a respected internet marketing agency and help other small business’ harness the power of internet marketing. Once Valerie has passed the bar, I also plan to help her build an market her law firm.