Hmmm...You hated this place so much that you...decided to become a full-time staff member. Boy, if that ain't just hypocrisy, I don't know what is. Go somewhere else, please. I'm begging you. God, I hope you don't work for me...Anonymity is a pain.
I've been here for a number of years as a flight instructor. Yes, the place has its drawbacks. Yes, some people hate the sims. However, some people think that flying is too expensive and they'd be bitching about that instead. Are we perfect? Nope. Are the people at Financial Aid helpful? Nope. Cheap tuition? Nope.
However, we're working on it. The problem is turning around a corporate culture that has expected others to conform to their idea of what is good and what is not. In the past year alone, ERAU has done the following to its Daytona Beach campus to address your concerns:
- ousted the top management (chairman, Chief CFI, and one Asst Chief CFI) of the Flight Department and streamlined the management structure
- ousted the President of the university and replaced him with very down-to-earth, no-BS guy intent on redirecting the $ to campus improvements and not to misguided programs like CAPT
- appointed a new Chancellor to the DB Campus (Dr. Tom Connolly - former Associate Dean of the College of Aviation and a really nice guy)
- redesigned the flight curriculum to offer more choices in curriculum; expect to see a single-engine AND multi-engine track available to all students, along with an option to fast-track your training (if you qualify, you'll fly 5-6 days per week instead of 3)
After all of this is said and done, we typically hire many of our own students as CFIs, where the pay is much better than your average flight school for the predictability of work that you get (you don't have to find your own students). Our CFIs start at $14.72/hour and top at about $22/hour with full faculty benefits, including free tuition. I got a graduate degree from ERAU free of charge. Not bad for a CFI. Can UND offer the same? I'm actually curious, as I don't know...
Don't discount the fact that ERAU graduates are everywhere. Somewhere else on this board someone mentioned pilots at interviews being ERAU grads. This is certainly true east of the Mississippi for DAB grads. West is true for PSC grads. Everywhere you fly you hear an ATC controller talking about how he attended back in '85. You'll meet pilots everywhere that will help you get a job. Again, perfect? Nope. Perhaps we need to work on managing our expectations...
Everyone on this campus is eerily aware of how poor customer service has been for too long and the leadership in place now has the attitude that you either will go along with improving the student experience or you will be slowly worked out of the system. It's gonna take a few years to fix it, but we're on our way. Yes, we're actually doing this.
As far as DB itself is concerned, it's much nicer now than it was when I got here...which isn't saying much. Still plenty of not-nice places, but you can avoid them quite easily. It's not as if you have gangs rolling down International Speedway Boulevard during the races. I lived in town for 5 years before moving north and am glad to be out, but I never feared for my safety when living in town. It's just a little too crazy with the bikes, races, and tourists. Like it or not, it's a tourist economy here with a ton of small colleges. It grows on you...unless you're homesick, in which case you'd even hate nice places like Denver, Minneapolis, DC, NYC, etc.
In any case, the bashing here is a little exaggerated but founded at least in some fact. Just know that we're doing our part to try to improve things a bunch. Not just a little. It needs to be more affordable with better service and a better experience. Period. It'll take some years to get there, however. In the meantime, really a pretty good school. And the AS degree can be worth it, if only for the internships (which help you get jobs at lower mins later).
Have fun and flame away.
