Preamble
While this is one of the longer posts in my portfolio section, it's a few years of some of the most intensive learning i've undergone and valuable context about myself and where I've come from. Hopefully you find it somewhat entertaining. :)
The Decision
I decided that I needed to get a college education after a company I had been working with for a few years went through the ISO 9002 certification process and they insisted that they couldn't work with me, since I wasn't a college graduate and didn't have a diploma (bonkers). The vast majority of people I knew thought it was an obvious choice to get into programming since computer, networks & hacking on them was my personal passion.
Living in Oshawa at the time, to figure out where to go to school, I walked across King st. and stopped in at every computer related company (keep in mind this was the mid 90s and the Internet and the dot-com bubble was still growing), I asked everyone a singe question, "What College do you hire graduates from?". Interestingly to me at the time, 100% responded with exactly the same answer, "CDI College".
CDI was a respected name at the time, and since they were located in island plaza at the edge of Oshawa, I popped in the same day. In retrospect, I'm sure I was quite the sight to behold, long hair, small goatee, Birkenstocks, ripped jeans and a poncho, I was a typical 20 year old gen-X that was into metal and grunge (a 90s hippy). I met with a woman named Yvonne and told her I was interested in taking one of their diploma programs for programming. She eyed me up and down and said "well, we need to test you to see which courses are the right fit for you".
Preamble
CDI had an entry exam, so she poured me a cup of coffee (terrible coffee, possibly the worst coffee ever) and took me to a storage room, handed me a paper test with about 50 questions on it and told me I had 2 hours. I was perplexed, I was done in about 25 minutes and took another 5 to 10 to re-review all the questions and answers, did she tell me the wrong expected duration? Even more perplexing, after about 35 or 40 min when I returned to her desk, she asked me if I was struggling with something, and had a look of disbelief when I told her I wasn't stuck and found it quite easy.
I pressed to again talk about the programs they were offering and so, with a kind smile, she handed me their General Programmer course outline, informed me that it would take them a day or two to review my test and they would get back to me. I felt a little brushed off but headed home. To my pleasant surprise when I got home I had a message on my answering machine (wonders if the reader knows what that is), "Oh Mr. French, this is Yvonne from CDI College calling you, you were in here about an hour ago and I just wanted to say that we would be privileged to have you at our College, please give me a call back at your earliest convince." ... I didn't know what to think but her demeanour had certainly changed. I found out a few years later (I eventually went to work for this same campus) the reason for her change in behaviour toward me was that I had aced their entrance exam and had in fact scored almost perfect.
Off to Guelph
My live in girlfriend at the time was accepted into the University of Guelph and was assured 'family residence', so while I had gotten my ducks lined up and ready to start in Oshawa, I had to switch to the Hamilton Campus to start at CDI for this 2 year program. The universe had my back and I was able to locate another student starting the same week as I in Hamilton who also lived in Guelph, Peter. Win-Win, Peter would drive, I would cover 1/2 the gas weekly, we met Kevin on our first day, CDI ran their programs as self directed with small cohorts starting every month or two. Peter, Kev and I hit it off immediately, a bunch of jackasses who knew a little more than was good for them from the start.
I'm not gonna water it down, the three of us were trouble (in the most hilarious ways from our perspective), when we got to Programming in C (one of the earlier programming courses), we learned how to modify the computers graphic buffers (pointers for the win!) so, we animated all the DOS characters. We managed to assemble and compile this into a NPM module (Novell Networks), hack into their campus server (really it wasn't very secure) and embed our module in the login script. Kev also whipped up a small script to look for our three 'aliases' in the administrator group and if not found, re-create and re-add us as admins on the network.
The end result of this was the ONA (Onsite Network Admin) literally pulling out his hair while everyone else thought the network had been infected by a virus (basically every letter typed on the terminals was animated in some way, so it looked like the screen was moving / had been hacked), and while he could see the hacker aliases on the server, he couldn't get rid of us or prevent us from being in the admin group. The three of us eventually fessed up (and almost got booted out), but we agreed to help them secure their network servers in exchange for good C programming grades and not getting expelled, and we had to promise to never do anything like that again. Hilarious (and lucky).
Back to Oshawa
I think about 6 months (or maybe it was 9) is how long my girlfriend lasted at Guelph, she wasn't getting good enough grades and got the boot. So we had to move out of family res and back to Oshawa we went. This meant I had to transfer back to the Oshawa campus and lost touch with my initial cohort. The new Instructors in Oshawa appreciated the good grades and knowledge I had acquired in Hamilton and we got along well enough. I was well ahead of 'schedule' and as I was approaching the 1 year mark, was almost done. The nature of self directed programming was that you would start a course and get a time line like 4 weeks, but there was no penalty for completing a module early, so I would grind. I was like a sponge and literally flew through the material.
Extra Credit & The Fishbowl
The college knew that they needed to slow me down, I had gone the OSAP route and taken on significant debt, the college needed me to be in attendence for the full two years, they couldn't take my second years tuition if I was finished, so they set up a 'pilot' for a group of us and put us in this room in the middle of the campus with windows all the way around it. We named this 'the fish bowl'. Other student, or staff giving a tour of the campus would always tap on the glass as they walked by. The pilot was reviewing a new course they were working on, and the small group of geeks in the fishbowl were up for the challenge, what the college thought would take us a month, took us a week and we also built a secure (more secure that the rest of the campus) in the fishbowl so we could play games (like red-alert and warcraft).