Given plenty of time I'd probably focus on e.g. contributing useful code to open source projects (maybe scipy, numpy? not sure what aerospace involces). Probabl

Given plenty of time I'd probably focus on e.g. contributing useful code to open source projects (maybe scipy, numpy? not sure what aerospace involces). Probably cheaper and definitely faster than college, and doable in parallel to paying work. You'd have to ramp up some on your own, of course. But then you can point at real scientific computing code, which is better than "and I took some classes".