Don't get too discouraged by its corporate cooties. It's true that the language doesn't have a lot of sex appeal (no dialect of BASIC ever does), but it actually has a lot of cool stuff that's worth exploring. All told, you're actually pretty fortunate to be getting taught in one of the few languages a you might see in a high school curriculum that has decent support for interesting things like functional and asynchronous programming. All in all, VB.NET can take you a lot further than you might expect from its reputation among people who don't know it very well or are still sore about losing VB6.