Imagine starting a family with $30,000 per year. You were stuck in a job you didn’t know would lead to a bright, stable future. You were also $50,000 out of work.
Even if you lived in a poor area and only ate ramen noodles, your family’s survival would still be your concern. This is where one of our first graduates found himself after graduating college.
He jumped into a job that he knew was not going to provide him with any job security or offer him realistic growth opportunities. He became a network engineer less than a year later after completing the program. His family no longer has to worry about money.
It wasn’t easy for him. He had more setbacks and challenges than you could imagine. It could have been getting in an accident that changed his life in one way or the other. He also lost his mother very young and saw his father break his back to provide for his brothers and him.
These experiences gave him the ability to be resilient and determined. He was able to leverage his talents and skills to launch his career and triple his income within months thanks to the Zero to Engineer program.
Chase Mitchell’s story begins in a ranching community of approximately 1,200 people in west Texas. Children dream of racing trucks and making them roar.
As a child, Chase shared these interests and many others. Chase’s life-threatening accident left him in hospital for several weeks. This changed his ambitions.
After his motorcycle accident, Chase Mitchell lies in a hospital bed.
Chase explains, “I had been lying in the hospital bed for 2 weeks wondering what I was going do with my life.” Chase says, “When I noticed all of the technology in that room, which was making it easier for me to recover.”
I thought to my self: That’s what I want! Although I didn’t know much about it, I knew that I wanted to understand it.” He had always been interested in technology before the accident. He used to play with an Apple 2 computer as a child and tried to understand the technicalities of it as much as possible.
He enjoyed it, but he never felt the need to be a programmer (a little ironic considering he has been learning network automation skills and at that point, he believed coding was his only option).
He is one of three siblings. He left his family tradition behind to go to college to pursue a career as a technie. He chose Angelo State University. It was only an hour and a quarter away, to be more precise.
Chase received a Bachelor’s degree in Management of Information Systems in 2012. Although he is proud to have earned his degree, he regrets not going to college. Terry would have been there for him if he had met him a few years ago.