>> I did an apprenticeship program.
It was sponsored with my employer,
so the classes that I took, I paid a nominal fee for them.
But if I -- as long as I got good grades in the night classes they were covered.
And the whole time, they started apprenticeships at half of what a journeyman earns
and then increased the wages at the same time.
So it didn't cost me anything extra, and I made the living wages the whole time,
and learned on the job and kind of ended up in this.
I did the mandatory two years of plumbing classes and two years of pipefitting classes
as part of the apprenticeship that I took.
And the way that they went together, we worked with --
the instructors were also foremen in our company.
So sometimes we would be working with the guy who was our teacher.
So if I had a conflict or an obstacle, or something I didn't understand out in the field,
I could talk about it that night at class and say, hey, what was --
what were we supposed to do in this situation?
And they were able to explain how the stuff
in the book really related to what happened in the field.