This is how I got started programming professionally. During my freshman year, my CS prof had funding for a climate research project and he first set me up as a

This is how I got started programming professionally. During my freshman year, my CS prof had funding for a climate research project and he first set me up as a UNIX admin then a C and Perl programmer. In addition to learning UNIX and programming, it paid about 3 times as much as any other work study job, and I got to put "participated in NSF funded research" on my resume. I wasn't even a good programmer, I just wasn't as bad as everyone else.