Starting out with no money in school

I first started reading about investing at The Motley Fool in the late 90's. I occasionally read it now, but that's where I initially learned about Index Funds, DRIP's, Roth IRA's, and discount brokerage accounts. They're a lot heavier on the advertising now, and I think they force to login to read some of their articles. But, they're still a good source of information.

So, while I was in grad school I started a Roth IRA account with Scottrade (which I still have and recommend because I've never had a problem with my account, they have offices everywhere, and they have low trade commissions at$7) and put money into it whenever I could. That was pretty hard to do living off my stipend as a research assistant, but I managed to invest $3000 over three years. Before I started my job at the end of 2003, my Roth IRA was worth a whopping $3114 which I was pretty happy with considering that some of my investments hadn't faired so well over the years. For the curious, I was invested in the following at the time:

1. Ebay - 11 shares
2. Home Depot - 11 shares
3. Kroger - 20 shares
4. MWave - 82 shares (not the same as the online retailer, they made circuit cards)
5. MDY - 6 shares
6. Sun - 131 shares

From my experiences with those stocks (excluding the one "spider" - MDY), I will never buy into a grocery chain again (Kroger) because I was not aware of their super-thin margins, I will be more wary of tech stocks like Sun Microsystems. And my biggest learning experience out of those stocks is that I will never pick a stock based on someone's "hot tip". I think it was an email that I got that made me aware of MWave which was around $9/share when I originally bought it and of course had had outstanding performance prior to my buy (like most tech stocks before the bubble burst in 2001). Before I finally sold it, it was worth less that $1/share. Ughh.

The rest of my investments were in DRIPs (Dividend Reinvestment Plans) which I still have. In Dec 2003 I had the following:

1. Kimberly Clark - 9.102 shares
2. Pfizer - 17.481 shares

I still contribute monthly to my Pfizer DRIP and occasionally to my Kimberly Clark DRIP. This is mostly because Pfizer has an auto-debiting system in place whereas Kimberly Clark requires me to write a check every month and even then they are only deposited on certain dates every few months.

Well this is basically where I was before I started my career 3 years ago.