I Spent Two Years at Informatics Alabang – Here’s My Unfiltered Take
I was standing at the jeepney stop right outside the gate last week, waiting for a ride to the mall after getting my NBI clearance for a new job, and I smelled that same grilled isaw I used to buy after 5PM classes. The same vendor, Mang Boy, still has his plastic stool set up next to the utility pole, still charges 20 pesos a stick. It got me thinking about the question I see posted on local Alabang community groups all the time: is it worth it? I went there for a 2-year diploma in web development back in 2019, so I figured I’d write down what I actually think, not the glossy stuff they put on their brochures.
I didn’t get the UP or UST cut-off that year. My mom was a cashier at Robinsons Place, my dad drove a jeepney along the Alabang-Zapote route, we couldn’t afford tuition for a four-year private degree, not even the one down the road. Informatics ran those Facebook ads saying “Graduate in 2 years, work in IT right after” and tuition was half what other schools charged, plus it was 20 minutes from our small house in Almanza. So I enrolled.
First awkward thing that stuck with me: Enrollment week was chaos. The aircon in the admissions area broke, it was 32 degrees out, I sweated through my only nice polo and the lady at the desk got annoyed when I asked to re-photocopy my form because the first one smudged through. I thought oh great, this is what it’s gonna be like. And honestly, some parts were. Half the classrooms on the second floor had broken aircon that first semester. Management said they’d fix it, took them a whole month. We all brought extra handheld fans, sat by the open door, and the guy who sat next to me always brought a whole bottle of ice-cold Ginebra and poured it into his tumbler – said it cooled him down faster than water. We laughed so hard the teacher almost kicked us out. The parking lot is always a squeeze too – I drove an old beat-up Honda Beat back then, and I scraped my right mirror on a parked SUV my first month, it cost 800 pesos to fix and I skipped lunch for two weeks to cover the cost.
The teachers are straight up hit or miss, no middle ground I’ve noticed. This one guy, Sir Jun, was a full-time senior dev at a fintech company in Filinvest, he just taught one class a week because he liked working with new people. He stayed after class every Wednesday to help anyone stuck on their projects. Once I messed up my first static website so bad the whole thing wouldn’t load, I was blinking back tears because it was due the next day, and he stayed until 7PM helping me untangle my code, bought me a 50 peso iced coffee from 7-Eleven next door. I still use the quick debugging tricks he taught me now, three years later. But then there was this other teacher for database class, who never prepared a lesson. He’d just pull up a 10-year-old YouTube lecture, scroll on his phone the whole time, and leave 20 minutes early. When we asked him questions he’d just say “just Google it.” That’s the thing about Informatics – you don’t know what you’re gonna get, and administration doesn’t really care enough to weed out the bad ones.
The career fair my last semester was another awkward mess. The guidance counselor called my name to get my recommendation letter, and she mixed up my folder with another girl’s who’d done graphic design projects. She stood there in front of the whole batch gushing about my “amazing billboard designs” and I had no idea what she was talking about, I got so red I just grabbed the letter and ran out. Skipped the rest of the fair, ate isaw alone by the jeepney stop. That’s the vibe here, it’s not the polished, curated private school experience. It’s a little messy, a little underfunded, things slip through the cracks all the time.
On the practical side, the one big win is the internship placement. They did place me at no extra cost at a small startup in Alabang Town Center that built websites for local restaurants. I got actual real-world experience there, and they hired me part-time before I even graduated. That’s more than a lot of other small colleges do, I think. The big downside, though? When I started applying for full-time higher-paying roles after graduation, three big companies out in the Filinvest business park rejected me immediately when they saw it was a 2-year diploma from Informatics. They said they only considered four-year degrees. I ended up staying at that startup for a year, and did two free coding certifications on Coursera after work every night before I could get the job I have now. Also, let’s be real, the curriculum is outdated. When I was there, they were still teaching PHP 5, which most companies stopped using years ago. I had to learn all the modern frameworks on my own time, after class. No one was gonna hand that updated knowledge to you.
So is it worth it? I don’t have a clean yes or no answer, no matter how much people want one. If you’re like me – you didn’t get into the big unis, you don’t have the savings for four years of private tuition, you just need a foot in the door to IT, and you’re willing to put in the extra work outside of class to learn the stuff they don’t teach? Yeah, it was worth it for me. I make more now than my mom did in 10 years of cashier work, I can pay my own rent, help my dad fix his jeepney when it breaks down. But if you have the grades and the savings to go to a four-year program at a state university or a well-known private school? It’s probably not worth it. You’ll get a more recognized degree, better resources, you won’t have to grind extra just to get companies to look at your resume.
I bought a stick of isaw from Mang Boy last week, and he remembered me. Asked how work was going. A group of first years sitting on the nearby wall heard me say I went there, and one of them asked me the same question: is it good? I just shrugged and said it depends on what you bring to it. They looked a little disappointed, like they wanted a straight answer. But that’s the truth, isn’t it? It’s not a magic ticket to a good job like the ads say. It’s just a school, messy and inconsistent, with good parts and bad parts. It got me where I needed to go, but it wasn’t easy. I don’t regret going, but I also wouldn’t tell everyone they should go. That’s just how it is.
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