>>1131519Yeah.
I had a lot of relevant industry experience even before college, so having that prior experience and skills on my resume that wasn't all college-based helped a lot.
Got pretty lucky with a small electronics/R&D company as a summer job through high school... being a small company I had to cover a lot of areas: not just electronics assembly, but also calibration, documentation, troubleshooting/repair, janitorial, machine-shop, etc. Basically when I was asked if I can do something, "Never done it before, but I bet if you showed me how to do the basics I can use the process docs and figure it out from there".
Some of the skills I learned there through the summers still help me today.
>tfw being the only one in my high school class that knows what laser interferometry is>and actually using it to characterize transducers>beats the hell out of working fast-food, even though I was paid about the same>but the industry experience was totally worth what they didn't pay me 
