As I see it, the reason you might enroll in LEAP is that you really, really want to be a MECHANICAL OR ELECTRICAL engineer.
I would like to echo absolutely everything LEAPstudent and anon_leap said about LEAP for CE. I feel like I could have written both posts myself. Luckily I cut my losses and dropped out after one semester in favor of this: https://generalassemb.ly/education/web-development-immersive. (See also: http://bootcamper.io/)
I can’t imagine recommending LEAP for CE to anyone wanting to be a software engineer. If you are already a competent programmer and absolutely insist on getting a piece of paper that says you earned a degree, you can just take a few classes at a community college and apply to a computer science program anywhere (hopefully at a cheaper state school). If you are not yet much of a programmer and are looking to LEAP to give you the skills to be a software engineer, you will NOT find what you are looking for here.
I got my bachelor’s degree from a large state school but found the quality of education at BU to be abysmal in comparison. I could write a book of example after example of incompetence in teaching and administration here. To this day, I have not seen what the requirements are for Phase I but it seemed that they were different every time I talked to my advisor (who gave me attitude about having already sent me said requirements, even though they change every few weeks). If you look at the curriculum, you will see that there is a heavy emphasis on hardware in the department. The few software classes they do have look really good in the course description/syllabus, but in my experience/from what I’ve heard, in reality they completely suck.
The more software engineers I talk to, the more I hear that you do not need a degree to get into this profession. Any employer will care way more about your programming skills than your education and BU will just waste time that you could have spent working on skills you will actually need to get hired for even an internship.
You will also incur an outrageous amount of debt—even with a scholarship, expect to pay AT LEAST several hundred dollars a month for a couple decades after you graduate. Do not forget about interest. Also, while the department made it seem like there was a good chance of getting a scholarship for phase II, my impression once I arrived was that this was rare.
You might also want to know: the department furthermore told me that many LEAP students participated in co-ops, but once I arrived the career counselor told me BU doesn’t actually really have a co-op program—I would have to inquire to companies on my own to see if they offered co-ops.
