Personally, I'm not surprised by the responses here. Ive been programming for 25 years and have seen no end of people slagging off this language and saying that the other language is the best ever.
Basic of any flavour has had its detractors since the word go. This is probably because it was devised as a simple language to be used by the budding programmers and skilled non-programmers.
More people program in VB than any other language. I expect that there will be some relatively inexperienced people jumping in to say that someone using VBA to complete some simple task is not programming, but everyone wrote a "Hello World" program at some time, and a program is a program however little it does.
It is true that Basic was limited at first, and that compared to, say, C, its speed was not adequate for intensive operations, but VB.net compiles to the same IL as C# and VC++.net, so there is finally no arguement left there.
You might also find a difference of opinion between programmers who program for a living and those who do it as a hobby. Hobbyist tend to be more, shall we say, single-minded. As do programmers who haven't used more than one or two (usually related) languages. These people can't do what they want to do in a new language right away, and then blame the language.
Programmers who have used a dozen or more languages for commercial gain (IMHO) have a different opinion (I have used Cobol, Fortran, Pass, IDCAMS, CLIST, Wylbur Execs, Rexx, IBM370 Assembler, Z80 assembler, VB4/5/6/.net, C++, C#, Forth, HTML, PHP, CF, Java, JavaScript, Perl, EasyTrieve and others).
It is my belief that all the languages have their place, and most applications could be successfully written in quite a number of languages. There is nothing wrong with a quick simple language.
So to answer your question (finally) then yes, VB is used all the time in real world applications. My advice to you would be to try out as many languages as time permits. If you are not going to end up coding to someone elses spec, then the experience will allow you to concentrate on how best to solve the problem in a general way. That will allow you to use your experience to decide which language is best for your solution. The danger with knowing only one language is that you make the problem fit the language.
If languages are methods of transport, then they all have their uses. Sometimes, in the city, walking is the quickest and best solution, but if you are in London and have to get to Delhi, then it's probably better to fly.
You could use assembler to create a GUI, but you would be re-inventing the wheel, and it would be like creating a skyscraper by superglueing grains of sand together.
In the real world, you use the largest building blocks you can get away with.
Good luck with the career.
HTH,
Ian