Help me choose my Community College please! (Yakima Valley CC vs Cascadia CC)

hiporcat

Bit of a dilemma here, so i started at Yakima Valley Community College but my grades slipped after i was in an accident, 2.11 GPA. I've switched my degree over to networking but I'm afraid my GPA will hold me down. I'm thinking of selectively transferring classes to Cascadia Community College, as they are the "number 2" community college in the nation. I want to finish my BA through WGU after what I've read on this forum.

Cascadia is near Seattle and will be much better situated for tech jobs than Yakima, but YVCC will get me the CCNA, MCSE, & MCSA certs during the program. Cascadia's is a more general degree with no certs but will prolly have better facilities as they are a sister school to the University of Washington, which is a great technology school.

Are the certs more important than the reputation of the school? Should i just go for a computer science degree if i plan on transferring to WGU or will that leave me with a "toothless" AA in the meantime? This forum is great and has been instrumental in my career switch, any info helps thank you.

Also, i'm getting my clavicle re-broken and plated due to the fore mentioned accident. I have a high tolerance for pain but my doc advised me to drop out this semester, do you think a plated clavicle and a little prescription painkillers will mess up my entry level IT classes?

YVCC Networking AAS classes, not sure if the CCNA, MCSA, MCSE are part of the course or just trained for
<Yakima Valley Community College Network Administrator> (these go with 59 credits of core IT classes)

Cascadia Community College AAS Networking classes, no certs but better school
<AAS Degree, Network Infrastructure Technology at Cascadia Community College: IT, information technol>

Cascadia's computer engineering AA; i definitely would transfer for this course to salvage my GPA, being engineering and what-not
<http://www.cascadia.edu/Files/AS-T Track 2 Engineering- Comp and Electr Engr MRP- 121311.pdf>

erpadmin

I won't comment on which school you should go to, but consider this:

Certs are nice, but they are really viewed as an afterthought in academia. That might not matter to you right now, but it might if you ever want to pursue a Master's at some point. Even at a school like WGU, there is a lot of paper writing involved. Whichever of those schools you choose, you'll want to be comfortable with that, as well as test taking (and that can come from certs, of course.)

I don't know how your personal physical and mental constitution is in regards to how you can deal with painkillers, but all painkillers are narcotics. You will need to eventually ween yourself the percs, dialudid (sp?) or whatever you're prescribed (likely the percs). I had to deal with them after my surgery, but I also knew I had to deal with work eventually. I was never into painkillers for fun (though I know they can be from others...lmao) so I had stopped taking them about three weeks before I had to report to work. If you don't personally know how you will feel with painkillers, you might be best served skipping out a semester IF you are going to need painkillers for a few weeks. I do know that you'd have to really abuse painkillers in order to get hooked, and I was careful to follow the prescription to the letter. Just keep that in mind.