Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology

I was a student here studying computer engineering. Word of advice: go somewhere else if you are wanting to enter into the computer industry. I was extremely dissatisfied with the overall education. The majority of professors have not actually worked in the computer industry in years (possibly since the 80s), and the education is about as archaic. I find it unacceptable for a school of today’s day and age to still be teaching Visual BASIC (should be .NET by now, and maybe they changed it to .NET). Also, it is TOTALLY unacceptable to have completely unqualified professors teaching programming classes when the students understand the language better than the professor does, it does not exercise the students when they are simply copying code from a book since the teacher isn’t qualified to teach it on his/​her own. I was unable to ask intelligent questions regarding any modern programming techniques as the teacher would never know the answer. Majority of everything I learned I got from reading online while in class (I learned more from the Internet than I ever did attending any of these half-​assed classes). Also, if your dream is to leave this school to work in the IT field, this is NOT the school for you, you will never be trained on any new server platforms (in fact they do not even have servers to train their students on). What kind of school can’t provide these resources. I had approached one of my professors about this, and the response was «we don’t have the resources for that». I was shocked that a school who seems to want to be at the front of the industry can’t seem to think outside the box and realize that there are thousands of services that cater to their very need for resources. For example, they could simply start up an Amazon EC3 cluster and that would provide more than enough resources for the school to train any student on any Operating System or any server package they should choose (but that’s probably to «modern» for their professors to figure out). They had only just gotten an Active Directory (many years to late) based network the year I started (thanks to the efforts of a student who apparently knew more than the professors or the IT department). You will never learn the fundamentals needed to become a Network Administrator in today’s day and age. It’s a major waste of a beautiful building and a waste of all students money. Save the money, buy your own hardware (it’ll probably come out to less than tuition anyways) and teach yourself in your basement, you will be ALOT better off. I had done some job interviews after graduating to get started in my field, and boy were my job interviewers surprised at the lack of education and training I had received. I even had a recruiter tell me that my education would have been great if it were 20 years ago, but seeing as I hadn’t had any training in LDAP, Active Directory, Exchange Server, Postfix, or even how to setup the most basic web server that my education was pretty much useless in today’s industry.
BFIT, if you read this, you need a MAJOR overhaul of your CE and CT departments, get with the times. It is now the 21^st century and majority of the students leaving your school cannot set up the most basic web server, Active Directory server, or Exchange server. At close to 20k per year, there is no excuse that you can’t afford the resources. It sounds like the school needs new professors who know where to find these resources. I had one professor who is no longer teaching for BFIT who was qualified in his field and he taught me Linux in my second semester, and he knew his stuff, he knew where to find the resources, and knew how to properly teach us students so that we’d learn.
Majority of the professors are very nice, but they just no longer have the skills necessary to teach the classes. The computer industry is fast moving and it’s changes are exponential every year, unfortunately the professors are still stuck in the past. Do not expect to learn the proper techniques to configure firewall policies, standard scripting skills that any job would expect you to have, or even the most basic networking skills. Expect to sit through two hour classes being lectured by teachers who cant even speak the English clearly, and learning the stuff you already know.
I had taken a Linux class 1^st semester, and I googled one of the professors to see if I could find any credentials that might support his ability to teach the class, as I was very suspect at his qualifications. I had been using Linux for years prior to even starting the course and the professor didn’t seem to know the very basics of navigating the command line let alone teaching an entire class on the OS. At any rate, the google search ended up digging up a forum that this professor had posted to asking how to burn linux and install it from CD. I think that alone is proof that he shouldn’t be teaching it. That is the FIRST and most basic step. DISGUSTED doesnt come close