<p>I know there's going to be tons of these threads in the coming days and weeks, so sorry. </p>
<p>I'm pretty sure that I'll end up having to choose between:</p>
<p>University of Texas - Austin
Rice
Carnegie Mellon
Cornell</p>
<p>In my own opinion, Rice is the weakest based purely on rankings. I hate the cold though, and everyone from my high school goes to UT. So I'm in quite the predicament. But my most important factor is attending a school that will give me the best preparation for creating my own tech start-up. Obviously a place like MIT would be ideal for that, but unfortunately I didn't get in.</p>
<p>I would probably suggest Cornell just because of the wow factor. But if you like UT and know people going there and feel good there, do that.</p>
<p>Academics-wise, you can't go wrong with any of those. What you should do is take a look at the curriculum at each school and course offerings and see if those suit your interests. For example, ECE at Cornell requires students to do a good amount of design work, which is not necessarily the case at, say, UIUC. </p>
<p>I can't comment on UT Austin, but Rice has a strong EE program as well--I'm judging this based on their digital signal processing group and the Connexions project, which is a reflection of Rice's. Carnegie Mellon has done some impressive work in wireless technologies, which is probably due in part to cross collaboration with its superb CompSci program.</p>
<p>I think that Cornell is slighty better than UT. I have met many students from both schools (in my internships) and from what they have told me Cornell classes’ seem very impressive. Nevertheless, UT is much better than Cornell in Wireless technologies and semiconductors.<br>
UT also has a very (very!) outstanding staff. Theodore Rappaport, Sanjay Banerjee, Yale Patt, Driga, Gary Daniels, and the list continues on and on…
Ive been in both schools actually and I can tell you that academically both are really good schools…
Austin is much better than Ithaca though.</p>