May 13, 2017 at 08:51AM

Reddit scan:Long story short I was in undergrad for five years, pretty highly ranked school, had no idea what I was doing for the first two and a half. Went to college because everyone told me that's what you do if you want a future, parents threatened to disown me if I dropped out, and I just didn't know why I was there. Halfway through, realized I loved arduino, game dev, and makerspaces, changed my major, and passed everything with flying colors from that point on. Unfortunately there were so many F's and Incompletes already on my transcripts that my overall GPA doesn't look too great. I graduated in 2014 by the skin of my teeth, mostly because my lead advisor liked me as a person and saw how much I'd improved since I got there.I've noticed there are some post-bacc programs floating around, but many of the ones I've found seem to be for specific schools. For example, the post-bacc at University of Vermont will get you into the MS program and UVM, the post-bacc at Tufts will get you into the MS at Tufts, same with Drexel, Brandeis, BU, etc. They don't seem to be interchangeable. OSU has that program, but OSU's is essentially a full CS degree taken online, rather than brushing up on 4-6 core courses.I've also looked into bootcamps like Hack Reactor, which can be completed online in 3-6 months and costs significantly less than college, but many people seem to have a pretty dim view of these bootcamps so I don't want to get too invested. I'm a working professional with a family so I can't just pick up and move somewhere in pursuit of a degree unless I know it's going to work out. I have enough savings to comfortably quit my job for six months, but not for a 2-4 year degree program. We're thinking about relocating to the Philadelphia area in the next year sometime, but I've noticed a lot of the schools in Philly only accept people with top tier GPAs.Would it be worth it for me to just take the core CS classes at a local community college so I can boost my GPA, or are community colleges frowned upon when returning to school? The upside to the community college would be cost (around $750 per course a opposed to the $3-4000 it would cost at some of the programs I mentioned above), and that I can start as early as next week. Realistically right now I could take one class per semester, but if I scaled back my working hours I could take two. Realistically, would that help boost my GPA faster?There are a lot of ideas in this post so props to anyone who tries to tackle it. Thanks. http://ift.tt/2qcvBDm by Towson Makerspace