In my experience, you are unlikely to obtain truly quality instruction from a dojo headed by a shodan. If you are a rank beginner in aikido (and particularly a rank beginner in martial art), my recommendation is to seek out someone with extensive aikido experience to give you a solid grounding in the fundamentals of the system. I didn't realize just how much better high-level instruction can be until, after wandering through a few aikido dojo, I trained for a while at the Shobukan in D.C. (that's Saotome-sensei's base school). The first thing I learned there was just how little and how slow my learning was elsewhere. :P
Roberto Valenzuela
Owari Kan-ryu sojutsu (尾張貫流槍術)
Shinkage-ryu heiho (新陰流兵法)
"Be intelligent, but do not be artificially intelligent." --Kung Fu Proverb
"Culture Check: Korean Arts still determined to make indigenous martial history from 4,000 year old cave drawings. France counters by claiming Savaate developed from hunting woolly mammoths before Ice Age." --The Nth Degree