What is your background education/experience?

I'm just curious where everybody here got their start. I fell in love with it about 6 months ago when I entered a training course at work. I'm now studying it in college!

So, how about you guys?

 

Was a high school drop out because of family and housing reasons. Self taught myself PC repair, Graphic Art, Video Editing, and general all around computer skills over 10 years. Then I was hired on by a company install a voip/CRM system and do IT support. Well the company had a product that ran on a PIC16f. They wanted to get some work done on the code and tried hiring someone to do it but really we couldn't find anyone that even could do it. We flew a bunch of hobbiest in to see what they could do but they pretty much didn't know much of anything. So the big boss basically said hey you, learn how to program this thing and see what you can do. It wasn't easy but I managed to jump right in and make all the modification they wanted and teach myself basic ASM in a couple weeks. I had always been facinated with electronics but could never afford to dump the money on dev kits and the hardware required to do so. Well after that I knew a little more about what was going on and have been getting deeper and deeper into it over the past year on my own. I've got a great project I'm working on that already has venture capitalist interested so I'm hoping to finish up the prototype in 2-3 months and getting rich. Then I want to go to college.

 

Lots of us older type sort of apprenticed into electronics in TV shops. But then I couldn't dodge the draft any longer, so I went into electronics in the Navy.

This is a link to a past thread on the same subject - http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/showthread.php?t=27914

 

started out dumpster diving hifi systems and such as a wee lad, about 7, would bring them home and take them apart marveling at the neat circular and square thingys abundant inside, of course, not even knowing what stuff was called or what it did. I didn't mess with tvs, mom said no.

Once I was about 10, my stepdad came into the picture and he taught me a lot about computers and I built my first system (a mega manically turbocharged 386 with like Kilobytes of RAM Im tellin ya!) yeah, it was around the turn of the decade (1990)

Anyways, I always wanted to get into electronics engineering but ended up teaching myself about mechanical stuff and metallurgy instead. Always told myself I couldn't ever understand EE because everything is pretty much invisible and super math heavy.

About two years ago, my former company hired an actual EE and we became good buds, and basically he inspired me to follow my interest and not let anything get in the way this time. We still meet for lunch every month or so and go over questions that are giving me trouble.