Also, you have to separate your enthusiasm from your assessment of the school. I wasn’t able to do that, and ended up picking a school based on a great introductory flight (with a 900-hr instructor that was a month away from leaving for Alaska). The other instructors, the ones I’d be training with, had significantly less experience. This ended costing me, both in the pocketbook and in training confusion.

That leads me to something I hate to raise. The ugly side of aviation is that many flight instructors are time builders. I have friends who graduated at the same time as I did, and they are absolutely clear about their feelings toward instruction: I’ll do it for 1000 hours and then I’m [expletive] gone. As an extreme example, I had an Assistant Chief Pilot at one school who was keeping track of the hours he had left before he could leave. Once he had his job lined up, the first then he’d do after every lesson was update his count down. Ouch! Spotting these guys isn’t always easy–an enthusiastic instructor could be genuine, or looking at you as a few hundred hours on the way to a turbine job. Try as many instructors as you can, and don’t be afraid to switch or go to another school if you don’t feel like you’re getting what you need from every lesson.