Hello everyone, thank you all for your well thought out answers! I wanted to follow up on this post because I've had a few other DM's who were in a similar situation as me reach out and see what route I ended up taking. Long story short I took the comments a few of you had about how long I have been diving to heart, bit the bullet, and put down my deposit at Rainbow Reef in Key Largo, Florida.
A few other motivating factors were that the main instructor at our shop really steered me in the direction of a "getaway" IDC because of all the after-class homework involved, and I'm glad she did. The homework was by no means overwhelming, but being in a bubble, away from work, around a group of 5 other IDC candidates definitely allowed me to focus on the course. The other reason was that if I waited until next year to do my IE, it wouldn't be until later in the year, past my shop's cert season so I would miss out on another year of getting a jump-start. Finally, for those that offered the idea that you can do the IDC in one place and IE in another, I knew this was an option but not one I would ever want to do looking back now. The relationships I was able to build with my candidate cohort and instructors not only through the IDC but by successfully completing the IE and celebrating with them was priceless.
In regards to Rainbow Reef, Ross Neill was the presiding Course Director, with a large cast of other CD's, MI's, and IDCS Instructors. Shout outs to Chad, Mustafa, Tim, Paul, Jo, and even Orlando the retail manager who helped us during the Business of Diving workshop. I have nothing but good things to say about my experience with Rainbow, the training seemed, to me, top notch and we were well taken care of. As you can see, RR has a huge staff which was definitely a help with everyone's development. For instance, a few of my fellow candidates struggled with the Dive Theory concepts but were able to identify one of the staff who they were comfortable with asking for help. For those looking to do your IDC, I can relate it to OW like this - you can think of IDCSI's and MI's as your "divemasters" in that they are a "less intimidating" person to go to than your instructor (in the IDC, your CD).
I took the opportunity to stay in the free on-campus housing which I was pretty blown away by how nice it was. It is definitely "hostel style" accommodations in that my apartment had 3 bedrooms with 2 twin XL beds in each room. I would highly recommend doing your class in the "off season" (December) because in that big apartment, it was just myself and a IDCSI who came down to audit the IDC to get his MI rating. The only knocks I had with the room were that there were some small ants, not as big as we get up here in the Midwest but nonetheless they were there; the level of maintenance wasn't the best, with a few spackled over holes unpainted and a cabinet door or two missing; and finally the cable TV in our room did not work and our room did not have a Roku like the others did so we had to go out to a bar to watch the NFL games on Sunday, not the end of the world. All in all it was a great environment to study, socialize, and feel safe in.
We had a 6 candidate cohort for the IDC and even though you get split into teams that compete "against" eachother, we were all able to pull together and form a strong bond. We did have a candidate or two who struggled with some pool skills but the cool thing was that our fellow candidates worked together to get them where they needed to be and Chad and Mustafa were kind enough to hang around to give us extra pool time on our final day of the IDC. It's a good thing we took that extra 30-60 minutes, because one of the skills we worked on was one of the 5 skills selected for our IE skills assessment. My biggest recommendation for incoming IDC candidates, practice your demonstration quality skills, especially the ones you don't think will be picked (things as simple as emergency weight drop and LPI disconnect do get chosen).
Between confined and open water I feel like RR definitely did a great job of preparing us for all the curve balls the IE can throw at you because Ross is also (or has been?) a PADI Examiner. We did countless pool dives, a confined open water dive at Jules Undersea Lodge (the same place our IE was conducted), and two boat dives in different days for our open water practice dives. We had the boats to ourselves for both these excusrisons which was a huge convenience.
When the time came for the IE I was somewhat nervous because of how much work we had put in to get to this point but once we had our intro session with the Examiner (Nick Jenny, PADI SE Florida Regional Manager) my nerves disappeared. I could tell after meeting Nick and having the material put in front of me that I was well prepared by my IDC to be successful. I won't get into exactly what skills were chosen for the IE because it's copyrighted information but suffice to say a few people are guaranteed have CESA. In terms of attendance our RR cohort took up more than half of the candidates at the IE with three from another Keys shop and one from Tampa. The entire group was split into two teams so Nick could have reasonable size groups to evaluate. I will say it was an incredibly comforting feeling having all 4 of my "students" that I would be "instructing" be people I had been in the water with for 2 weeks so I already knew what each of their skills looked like, making it easier to tell when someone had an assigned problem I had to fix.
Anyway, my IDC cohort had a 100% pass rate and we all had a great time. I would highly recommend Rainbow Reef for your IDC and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to direct message me or reply here!