Cuyamaca College. Where do I begin? Well...believe it or not, I have been going to this school for 5 years! I came out of high school with a very poor foundation and yet I decided I wanted to be an engineer! So basically, I started at the bottom taking classes that were just getting me up to speed like Beginners Math and English and some other classes that didn't seem too scary, like music and psychology. All the while, the professors were teaching me how to study efficiently while holding a full-time job. In the beginning I got a lot of C's and some B's. In general, I felt the professors motivated me more by giving me compliments on my work and telling me how to improve. It is very personal at this college. Eventually as years went on I started getting A's and B's, and very rarely a C, even as the classes got harder (like an A in Calc 3 vs the C's I got in algebra). I saw a counselor every semester and made sure I was on track with TAG. The counselors seem to care a lot. They saved me a ton of money by having me take transferable classes. I will have over 120 units when I transfer and my GPA is at a 3.35 (not bad for the slow start and 2.6 GPA I had in H.S.) Uni's charge about $200-400 per unit vs Cuyamaca's $46 (inc. from $18/unit when I first started). Either way I've saved over $30,000 over a Uni and the xfer process is seamless; when I graduate from college my Diploma will say "Davis, UCSD, or Calpoly" (still deciding) even though I saved money taking GE's at Cuyamaca.
I also went to Grossmont College for classes that were a better fit for my schedule since they are sister schools. I really don't like Grossmont and I think the main reason is because it is too much like high school. Their library has a bunch of computers but all anyone over there does is browse facebook and play games. The Grossmont campus, as a whole, is also a lot bigger and you seem to get lost in the crowd. The buildings are older and less modern. Not exactly my type of school.
Cuyamaca on the other hand has brand new facilities. For instance, the music dept has 5 grand pianos, one of which is worth over $100,000. All the classes in the H building (Sci & Math) have a/c, modern desks, big flat screens, and a projector which has a magnifying glass so the teacher can display plain sheets of paper on screen, and we even have a new Flame Atomic / Graphite Spectrometer which is a big deal for Chem. The Cuyamaca library is not as big as Grossmont's but it does have more quiet areas to study. The computers at Cuyamaca are also much more modernized, the screens are about 24" and have Windows 7 installed. The server stores your documents under your login, and you can access your stuff anywhere in the school.
I have had the opportunity of learning from some amazing professors, Jerry Riley, Dan Curtis, Peter Utgaard, Stephen Weinert, and Duncan McGehee all come to mind! There are some bad eggs though, but you can use ratemyprofessor for that, I don't want to embarrass anyone. As I stated earlier, Cuyamaca is more modern. It also FEELS like a college. People are here to learn and we are involved in clubs. I think it says something, that we have an engineering club and Grossmont students come to our school to be part of it even though they aren't taking classes at our school. Being the bigger school, why don't they form an engineering club at their own school? :)
Long story short with Pros/Cons:
Pros- Modern Campus
-Smaller college (more likely to take classes with people you know)
-Quieter study area
-Beautiful landscape
-Farmer's market every Saturday morning til afternoon
-Plenty of parking (unlike Grossmont)
-Campus police are not strict like Grossmont's (I got 2 tickets at Grossmont 1 at Cuyamaca but Cuyamaca lets you off with a warning if you contest it and say you learned your lesson, both police help with vehicle lockout / deadbattery for free)
-Classes are transferrable to Universities and are much cheaper (if you can handle the "lower status" of a community college for a couple years)
-Amazing faculty (rumor has it Cuyamaca pays more to retain good teachers)
-Science building built by same architect who build SDSU Science lab
-Newer computers (especially in library)
-Graphing calculator can be checked out for a whole semester at library (Grossmont checks out for 1 week only)
-Great Professor's
-Very helpful counselors
-Summer Classes available (we budget our money better so we didn't cut them)
-A huge garden with various rare plants and vegetation (if you're into that they even have electives)
Cons- Tutoring is better at Grossmont (you can sign up for 1 on 1 tutoring there for free)
-Athletics not too great (much better at Grossmont)
-Certain Science/Math are known to be much harder at Cuyamaca than other schools (a good thing if you want to be prepared for University), a bad thing if you want an easy A. read more