Carl Schaefer wrote:
I'd appreciate hearing any opinions of ECPI (a private technical college with a campus in Raleigh), their training programs and/or the graduates, especially compared with public community colleges like Wake Tech.
I can't speak to ECPI, but wanted to share some related thoughts. There is no formula that works for everyone, of course, so I would challenge any simplistic dismissal of any particular track. I attended Wake Tech way back in 1986 and received a computer engineering technology degree. I later attended Carolina and dropped out of the CS program. I have been fortunate over the last 20 years to have had great jobs doing interesting work in research programming, robotics, and now some management. My experience at Wake Tech was outstanding. For me, learning applied electronics, applied mathematics and digital logic, through building computers from discrete components in the lab, writing code in hex, etc, gave me a solid understanding of the machine. At this point in my career, I highly value that foundation and have a hard time believing I could have been as successful as I've been without it. It would be foolish of me to project that to others, though, it's all a bit of trial-n-error.
In the final analysis, though, I would say the reason things have worked out for me has less to do with any particular school, but with the countless hours I spent doing something I was passionate about. Of course, if one's passion is making farting noises with his armpit, he may need to use a log scale to measure relative success;-)
Kevin -- Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) http://www.renci.org University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Duke University North Carolina State University +1-919-445-9646 -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
