I started it as a dance instructor (after competing since I was 13 years old) then I saw that the dance studio director still shared a room (!!) with somebody else in a really crappy part of New York City, so I got a job on the airport from a classified ad my husband clipped from NY Times and I got really interested and passionate about aviation. Took a few lessons and went through a course for my dispatcher license.

I loved it and got hired internally the second try. If I tell you we were called 'flight dispatch officers' you might be able to figure out which airline that was.

In about 12 years the airlines headquarter and ops center moved to the Midwest so I opted to stay in NY and go to school for retraining. I choose WAN admin because there were no coding schools. Here I got my A+, MCSE, MCSD,CCNA,CCNP,CCIE. But in the meantime I got heavily involved in scripting and coding. So my first job was perl, PHP and SQL developer and I've been doing it for quite some time now. I must say this is the most liberal and appreciative career I've seen. As long as your work is done, you can be anywhere. Besides the great salaries, benefits, (,ok no travel) these jobs are fun. Good choice.