I broke into IT without a college degree. No computer science degree, no four years, no student debt. I studied for certifications on YouTube, built little projects in my bedroom, and applied to jobs every single day until someone said yes. This is the whole story, the parts that hurt and the parts that worked, because when I was starting out I wanted to hear from someone who actually did it, not a listicle.
Where I started
I grew up with my mom, who came to America from Ukraine on her own, looking for a better life. English became my second language fast, mostly because I was the one translating for her everywhere we went. She started her own house-cleaning business and we got by on it.
When I was ten, she got sick. Stage three cancer, though she never told me that. She acted like everything was fine, even on the nights I woke up to ambulances outside. I believed her, because she told me to, right up until the day everything was not fine and the illness took her. My older brother left his whole life behind in Ukraine to come to the States and raise me. After that, he was the person I had.
I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you because it is where the drive comes from. When you have seen how fast things can fall apart, building a stable future for yourself stops being a nice idea and becomes the only plan you have.
I was always the kid taking things apart
School I was good at. I stacked scholarships and ended up at a private college-prep high school full of kids with a lot more money than me. Senior year I talked my way into a coding bootcamp, learned QA and SDET testing, picked up Java, and took every computer science class on offer.
The real signal was older than any of that, though. I was the kid modding games and jailbreaking my devices for fun, and I was good at it. I made YouTube videos teaching other kids how to mod Animal Jam, Minecraft, and MovieStarPlanet. Nobody asked me to. I just liked building things and pulling them apart to see how they worked, and I liked showing other people how too. That instinct ended up mattering more than any class I sat in.
Why I skipped college
When I graduated, everyone I knew left for college, and I realized I did not want to go. I grew up without money, surrounded by kids who had plenty of it, and all I wanted was to not be broke anymore. Four more years of being broke, with no guarantee waiting at the end, was not the move for me.
I had heard about people landing tech jobs off certifications and bootcamps, no degree required, so that became the plan. I started with freelancing. The foundation that gave me my high school scholarship asked me to build them a website, so I did. A local school heard about that one and asked for theirs, so I built that too. The whole time I was freelancing, I was researching how to turn this into a real, full-time tech career, and I kept landing on the same answer. IT.
The certs, and how I actually studied
I studied for certifications using YouTube and Google. That is not me being humble, that was literally the entire budget. My first was the CompTIA A+, and it gave me the foundation I had been missing. Then I added the MS-900 and AZ-900, two more entry-level certs that opened up the Microsoft and cloud side of things.
I did not just memorize for the exams either. I built small labs and projects on the side and practiced everything I could get my hands on, the same way I used to take games apart as a kid. The certs got me past the filter. The hands-on practice is what let me actually answer questions once I was in the room.
The numbers game nobody warns you about
Then I applied. Every day, nine to five, like applying was the job, because for a while it was. I did that for four months. Most of it was silence. I was close to giving up when the interviews finally started landing in my inbox.
The interviews humbled me. I would prepare for hours, script exactly what I planned to say, and they would still catch me off guard. I failed a lot of them. But I kept going, and eventually I made it to the third round of my dream help desk job. I went onsite, met the whole team, and I wanted it so badly that I think they could see it on me.
They hired me. Later they told me there were more experienced candidates they could have picked, but they went with me because of how clearly I wanted to learn and grow. Hold onto that if you take nothing else from this. Hunger is a qualification, and the right team knows how to spot it.
What the job actually taught me
It was an onsite help desk role at an MSP, and it was chaos. Brutally busy, understaffed, tickets flying at me from every direction at once. I lasted eight months and learned more in them than a degree would ever have taught me, because there was nowhere to hide. You learn fast when there is no other option.
After that I wanted something calmer, and right when I stopped looking, a recruiter reached out. I took an internal IT role at a pharmacy. Smaller and slower, and because it was small I got to do real system administration and climb a few rungs I would not have reached at a bigger place. I finally had room to breathe and study, and I used it to pass my Network+ and Security+. About two years into IT, I actually felt experienced.
Why I built this
Around then I started posting tech content on TikTok and Instagram, and it took off. I built a Discord for people trying to break into IT without a degree, and the community kept growing. Talking to all of them, I kept hearing the same trap I had clawed my way out of. Entry-level jobs want experience. The only way to get experience is a job. It is a loop, and a lot of genuinely capable people get stuck in it and give up.
So I built the thing I wish I had had. A realistic IT support simulator, where you get real hands-on help desk experience before anyone hands you the job. Real tickets, real tools, the actual rhythm of the work, so that when you walk into an interview you can talk about what you have done instead of what you are hoping to do. That is the entire reason it exists, and it is why I eventually quit my own 9-to-5 to build it and help people break in the same way I did.
If that is you, sitting where I sat, with more drive than credentials, you are not behind. You are exactly the person I built this for.