When you become a member of iAnimate you get access to many things: the community of fellow animators, the amazing feature quality rigs which are still the best I've worked with and literally thousands of hours of lectures, demos, Q&As etc. This for me is probably the most important part.
My advice is to ensure that you have several days in which to devote to "studying" when access to the community first becomes available. I learned a lot from my instructor during my assignments, but I learned the most from the seemingly limitless supply of instructional videos. Do not take these videos lightly. Dedicate as many hours per week to watching them as possible. There are videos about virtually everything you can imagine to do with animation and best of all, you get to download them all and keep them forever! From Jason Ryan chatting with fellow animators about the industry and profession, to him explaining how he plans a shot in 2D and many on how he takes a shot all the way from blocking to polish - these are probably the ones I found most useful. These demonstrations about how he animates a shot range from cartoony runs to subtle facial acting and they will help you immensely. You get to learn his entire workflow and it really makes you think about your own workflow and how you can make it more efficient - something I am still striving to improve!
Take advantage of the community space and post your work. Not only can you receive further feedback from fellow animators but the more people who share their work the more inspirational work there is to watch. When I first started at iAnimate the community was very vocal and people were posting at a rampant pace. Unfortunately it did slow down as the weeks wore on and the community became quieter. Hopefully it has picked up again since.
One thing I would suggest to anyone wishing to apply is to research the different mentors before you choose the one you will work with (yes you get to pick which mentor you want, provided there is still space in their class). Figure out who you like the sound of the best and which one specializes in the type of animation you want to pursue (realistic, visual effects, cartoony). A lot of mentors are from Dreamworks and most have a similar style but still, make sure you check each one out a bit.
Finally, when the mentor critiques your work (once or twice a week depending on how they want to run their class) tell them that you want them to be harsh. Trust me you would much rather they tell you that your shot looks like crap than baby you. I often found that my mentor was too easy on both my work and the work of my fellow classmates. He was a great guy and a good mentor overall, I just think he could have pushed us all a lot further by being more honest and harsh.
Hopefully I've done a decent job at explaining my time there. It really is fantastic value for money and I recommend it highly to anyone looking to improve either animation skills :)
