<p>As I'm sure everyone here knows, US News ranks UIUC very highly for their engineering program -- and not so highly overall. Not an important criteria, but it does give one a vague sense of where a uni stands.</p>
<p>I'm very sure I want to major in Computer Science (typically an engineering program), which is something UIUC seems to be famous for. I'm considering a double major (CS + Math) or a Math minor, plus many, many physics electives.</p>
<p>I got accepted at Duke and Rice, and probably will be accepted at Cornell and Brown. </p>
<p>To be honest, I'm enamored by those schools' reputations, but UIUC's engineering and CS credentials are unbeatable (Stanford, MIT and Caltech rejected.)</p>
<p>Any advice? How should I go about making a decision? I'm an international student (Indian); how would that affect my experience here and at those other schools?</p>
<p>Can’t comment about other schools, but Microsoft hires the most out of UIUC, according to Bill Gates’ speech at Illinois in 2004. Also, Siebel Center for Computer Science is one of the world’s most technologically advanced computing building. CS at Illinois will not disappoint, with diverse range of courses (including classes like data mining), bright and motivated students, unbeatable career services (UIUC has the largest alumni network within Silicon Valley among Midwestern schools), and state of the art CS building.</p>
<p>Some of the prominent alumni include Jawed Karim/Steve Chen (YouTube founders), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect of Microsoft), Marc Andreessen (coauthor of Mosaic and founder of Netscape), Max Levchin (founder of Paypal and Yelp!), Dave Hyatt (coauthor of Firefox), and Lawrence Ellison (CEO of Oracle).</p>
<p>As a current UIUC student who would have also qualified as an ivy league caliber candidate back in HS, I can assure you that the engineering curriculum and students at UIUC will not disappoint. I see that you obviously haven’t written U of I off as a state school which I commend you. Good luck with your decision.</p>
<p>When you say “not so highly” for the overall ranking, that is a bit misleading. Unless it has changed drastically since I last looked, it was somewhere in the area of 34 overall, which is pretty good given the fact that USNWR uses some funky ratings criteria like endowment size, which screws over public universities. Outside of Engineering, Business, and a handful of other programs, the school is pretty run-of-the-mill, but there is not many publics that compare.</p>
<p>That said, I love the engineering school here, and though I am not a CS major myself, I know plenty who all love it, so that has to count for something.</p>
<p>Choose between UIUC and Cornell, Rice and Duke are far behind for CS
Oh and avg sat of admitted CS student here is 1390/1600 (data from 2 years ago, should be slightly higher now) which I think the students are comparable to cornell</p>
<p>yeah it is between uiuc and cornell. Both are cold places, so imho, if you can afford the costly tuition of cornell, you might go for it. But anyways both a great schools and have similar reputations in Asia, especiall in CS or engineering field</p>