[cadandcookies]

I'm in the tiny minority that prefers PTC's Creo platform to Solidworks or Inventor. This mostly comes from having plenty of resources available from my team and PTC, as well as the workshops PTC puts on in my area. Frankly, I also find it significantly more intuitive and logical than either Solidworks or Inventor (and easier to do time-saving things like UDFs and sketching constraints). Having used all three though (and having come from using Pro/E 3 at an internship), I can confidently say that none of them are impossible to learn over a summer break (I got a working knowledge of both Inventor 14 and Solidworks over a few months last summer-- they're both pretty easy to learn, even if they sometimes feel a bit dulled to me).

Ultimately though, it's as Chris said-- with something like CAD, it's best to go with the path of least resistance. If you school uses Inventor, don't teach all your students Solidworks. If your mentors use Pro/E at work, it might be worth using that because that's where their experience is and that's the way they can teach the students best. Go with the flow-- learning CAD is difficult enough for most students.