Advice needed on Home-Study Electronic courses
Q. I have been doing a lot of on-my-own reading about electronics and was wondering about the several home-study electronic schools you see advertised in magazines like 'Popular Electronics'... I have requested material from schools like CIE, NRI and the such. If anyone has any experiences, both Pro and Con, with these types of schools, you input is REALLY appreciated. Which do you think is the best or worst and why... Also, if anyone has encountered an audio tape course from a school called 'Command Productions' that alleges they can help anyone pass the General Radiotelephone Operators License (GROL), I would like to hear from you.
A. This last outfit is devoted to getting you through an FCC license test, which you can do by memorizing a lot of answers. It won't teach you any electronics, nor is it meant to--it's used by DJ's who want FCC licenses so they can get jobs as "combo men". A combo man is someone who can both DJ and be sort of a figurehead engineer as well. That way the station doesn't have to hire both an engineer and a DJ for overnight work. I thought that the FCC rules on this sort of thing had changed and that this kind of school was thus extinct--but obviously I'm wrong. If you want to learn electronics and are responsible enough to work on your own through a tough and often frustrating course of study, NRI or CIE would be fine. I have gotten good reports on both. There is no easy way to learn electronics, and a correspondence course is a rational way to go about it. I took NRI's course 25 years ago and have been swiping ideas from it to teach my own EE courses ever since. The laboratory exercises are particularly important. They're also particularly tough, which is to be expected. For some reason, the advertising material for correspondence schools has always focussed on the great stuff you'll build, like a TV set or a computer. They've been advertising like this since the 1930's. But the important part of the lab work is not the equipment, but how the lab work and the coursework support each other. I think I'll write for the various brochures myself to see how these schools seem to be doing. I to took a Course from CIE about 20 years ago at that time their electronics engineering course. It was an excellent course, and will require a lot of work. I still receive their news letter and it doesn't appear that their standards are any less. The course was fully accredited for GI bill funding. I would highly recommend their program's. Only one of the places I've ever worked for would even consider someone with a correspondence degree (and that one was because the pres. of the company had a correspondence degree). Most engineers don't consider them to be "real" degrees, even though it is certainly possible to get a better education that way than what you get at a university.
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