I Graduated From Informatics Alabang Three Years Ago – Here’s If I Think It Was Worth It
I got asked this question twice last month, actually. First from a 17-year-old from Las Piñas who DMed me on my stupid little coding TikTok, then from my neighbor whose son is still waiting on his UP results and doesn’t want to waste a year. I’ve been putting off answering because it’s not a yes or no, you know? No one writes the messy middle, everyone either shits on vocational schools or acts like it’s the best kept secret ever. I just have a bunch of random half-formed memories and opinions, so that’s what I’m writing down.
I enrolled in 2019 for the two-year web development diploma. I’d failed my USTET by like 10 points, locked myself in my room for three days crying, and my mom found a flyer for Informatics Alabang tucked in a grocery bag. It was 15 minutes from our house in BF Homes, shorter than a full four-year degree, and they promised you’d get a job right after graduating. We went to visit one Saturday, I got lost looking for the admissions office, walked in on a group of students smoking by the back entrance, and still said yes. I couldn’t handle the idea of waiting another year to re-take an entrance exam.
First few months, I noticed all the little messy stuff no one puts in the brochures. The aircon in Room 204 was broken the whole first semester, and admin just said they’d get to it eventually, so we all brought little USB fans that died halfway through class. The canteen had two stalls: one made really good pork siomai, the other always had undercooked rice and would overcharge you by 10 pesos if you weren’t paying attention. The guard at the front gate would let us sneak off campus for lunch at 7-Eleven across the highway if we slipped him a lemon candy every other week. That’s the stuff that sticks with you, right? All the small daily nonsense that adds up.
One of my instructors was late 45 minutes to every single Tuesday/Thursday class. Once we all showed up, stood outside the room for 10 minutes, and then heard him yelling at his girlfriend on the phone around the corner. No one knew what to do, we all just stared at our shoes until he finished, wiped his eyes, and then started lecture like nothing happened. That was weird. Half the instructors were working full-time in tech anyway, which was good and bad. Good because they knew what actual jobs are like, not just the outdated textbook stuff. Bad because sometimes they’d have to cancel last minute for a work emergency and no one would tell us until we’d all been waiting an hour.
But the hands-on part? That’s where it won me over. My cousin was taking comp sci at a big state university the same time I was, and he told me he didn’t get to touch a real code editor until his second year. All he did was memorize theory for exams. First week at Informatics, I was writing basic HTML on a lab computer. By the end of my first year, my instructor (the one that worked at that fintech in BGC) gave me and two other classmates a side project: build a simple e-commerce site for a client’s friend’s bakery. He paid us 5k each, let us put it on our resumes, and that’s the exact project I talked about in my first job interview. I got hired two weeks after I walked at graduation.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard, or that it didn’t suck sometimes. The stigma sucks, I’m not gonna lie. The first time I interviewed for a senior role two years ago, the hiring manager looked at my resume, paused, and said “Informatics, that’s… a training center, right?” I had to pull up my CHED accreditation on my phone right there in the interview to prove my diploma was real. That was humiliating. And cost-wise, yeah it’s cheaper than a four-year private degree, but it’s not cheap. My mom ran a small sari-sari store back then, and we paid 36k a semester, which was almost half her monthly profit. I worked part-time at a Coffee Bean in Alabang Town Center after class to cover my lab fees and allowance, and there was one semester I was two weeks late on my dues. They wouldn’t let me take my final project exam. I sat in the registrar’s office crying while my mom ran to my tita to borrow the money, and that’s a memory I still can’t think about without getting tight in the chest. Some of the facilities were garbage, too. Half the keyboards in the main lab had sticky keys from spilled soda, the printers broke every other day during deadline week, I must have walked down to the internet cafe on the corner a dozen times to print my work because the school printer was out of order again.
I see people online say it’s a scam, and I see people say it’s the best decision ever. I think it depends entirely on what you want out of it. If you want the whole traditional college experience – big campus, frats, big org events, the prestige of a well-known school name on your resume – this isn’t it. The whole campus is like three buildings, the biggest event we had all year was a small quiz night with pizza from Domino’s. I never went to a single college party while I was there, if that’s what you’re after. But if you’re like I was – 18, messed up your entrance exams, don’t have the money or the patience to wait four years to start working, just want to learn actual skills that will get you an entry-level job fast? It works. I know three people from my block that are already devs at big companies now, making more than a lot of my friends that graduated from four-year programs. I also know one guy that just skipped class every day, blamed the school when he couldn’t get a job after graduation, so it’s not like the school does all the work for you. You still have to show up, do the projects, take the opportunities when they’re handed to you.
Last week I drove past after getting my oil changed a few blocks away, and they’ve got that shiny new building up now, looks nothing like the old one I went to. I thought about that siomai stall, and that time the power went out in the middle of my final presentation, and all of us huddled by the window to show our projects on our dim laptop screens. I don’t regret going. Would I go if I could do it over again? Maybe, maybe not. If I’d passed my USTET, I would’ve gone there, obviously. But I didn’t, and this got me where I am now. I pay my own rent, I help my mom restock her store every month, I like my job. So yeah, for me, it was worth it. But that doesn’t mean it’s worth it for you. That’s just how it goes, I guess. (Word count: 1182)
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » I Graduated From Informatics Alabang Three Years Ago – Here’s If I Think It Was Worth It