I got my first-ever job as a web designer, building accessible websites with PHP and CSS. Then I taught myself PHP and MySQL and built an office intranet, billing system, and project management portal cutom-tailored to my office's needs. That was a student position.
When I graduated, I took a position supporting University financial applications. I taught myself ColdFusion and Oracle PL/SQL, and within a year took over as Team Lead/Project Manager for the Electronic Deposit application, tying together data from five banks and countless University departments, managing hundreds of thousands of database records.
What can I learn for you?
Let's go high-level.
Coming to programming via Lingusitics is an exercise in commonalities. Human and computer languages are closer siblings than you might realize: they're all syntax, semantics, and formal logic. Computer languages are a linguist's playground. Trust me, once you've dealt with Sanskrit sandhi, even the quirks of ColdFusion spring into perspectve. (5>=0 error, anyone? In Sanskrit, I dealt with phrases like "corresponding homorganic nonsyllabic semivowel." Once you can parse that, you can parse anything.)
For the five years of my undergraduate education at the University of Iowa, I worked at the Iowa Memorial Union's award-winning office of Marketing and Design. Starting early, I worked on interactive systems with PHP and MySQL - content management, project management, public housing listings, etc. I taught myself the basics of PHP/MySQL, and developing in a demanding environment taught me the rest – why never to use an enum field, the power of double variables, the importance of modularization...
After leaving that student position, I migrated over the the University's central HR building and took up a position in Information Management, Finance & Operations, where I worked on financial applications using ColdFusion and Oracle PL/SQL. I've recently relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I'm looking for work in a challenging and collaborative environment.