<p>So, I think I've narrowed down my choice of college to attend next fall to these 3 (I have already been accepted to all of them):</p>
<p>University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
University of Wisconsin (Madison)
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology</p>
<p>Any thoughts?</p>
<p>I currently live in Illinois and I plan to major in Computer Engineering. </p>
<p>I have already heard the arguments regarding tuition costs and I would really appreciate any advice that doesn't completely center around the money factor.</p>
<p>Consider looking at what companies recruit at these schools. I think that Illinois is the strongest, but I may be wrong. </p>
<p>Rose Hulman has a nice campus, is very small, and has a strong gender imbalance. It probably also has less social diversity than the other schools.</p>
<p>It depends on what part of engineering you want to go into, how sure you are you want to be an engineer, how cost sensitive you are, and your personality.</p>
<p>I’m a Rose alum and I think the world of it. One advantage is that most everyone works hard so you don’t have those crazy liberal arts majors to hang out with who don’t seem to do much of anything. That can hurt. Also you end up with a pretty tight community where a fair percent of people know who you are by your 2nd year. That’s pretty cool in general. A pure engineering school also means a lot of social niches need to be filled by geeks and that lets you take a social role you might not otherwise fit. I turned into something of a student leader (RA, sports club founder, officer in APO) and that was really good for me. The down sides are cost (massive) and if you decide you don’t want to do engineering you pretty much need to leave. Plus Terre Haute isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. </p>
<p>Ill. has a really strong engineering program. It will be a lot more “sink or swim” than Rose but it will probably do a better job for you if you are a PhD-bound type. Cost should be a lot nicer though the school is having serious financial troubles and so some things are unpredictable. The town is okay.</p>
<p>Wisc. generally doesn’t have much to offer that Ill. doesn’t other than a much cooler town. Much. Cost is probably a lot higher, so unless they are really good at something Ill. isn’t that you want to do I have a hard time recommending it for you just because it’s out of state.</p>
<p>Oh, just noticed the CompE part. In that case I think Wisc. is out. Its CE program is great but Ill. is too and cost should send you in-state. I don’t know enough about where Rose is these days in CompE but in my day it was a bit weak (The program is about 20 years old now and I was one of the first so my information is dated). I do know both Wisc. and Ill are outstanding in computer architecture research…</p>
<p>Thanks for the extremely detailed reply Hobit! You bring up a lot of good points.</p>
<p>I for one would love to be able to consider each of the three evenly based on their CompE program, college life, location, etc. Unfortunately, it looks like everything might ultimately boil down to the $ factor for me, especially after taking another look at how low Illinois in-state tuition is compared to Rose and Wisconsin. I guess I should consider myself lucky that Illinois has a pretty reputable engineering school.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, though, did you happen to major in computer engineering at Rose? You mentioned being “one of the first.” It would be kind of ironic since I first heard about the school from a friend whose brother is trying to get a double major in CE and CS there.</p>
<p>I am a UIUC alumnus. I loved it there and in grad school I have found my education on par with any of the other people I have met (including the MIT and Berkeley guys I work with). Sure that is anecdotal but that is my experience. Illinois did a great job with my education.</p>
<p>It is huge, but that can be both a drawback and a blessing. It stinks because you have to give a little bit more effort to get personal time with professors, but it is still not that difficult with most profs. On the other hand, it is great because you will get professors with a myriad of backgrounds, have a myriad of research opportunities if you so desire that experience, and you get to meet a ton of different people from a bunch of different backgrounds. On top of that, there are many, many student activities.</p>
<p>I would love to keep writing but I am on vacation and need to get to relaxing this morning. The bottom line is that with any of these schools you will get a great engineering education.</p>
<p>Illinois KompE has the course ECE411, which from what I gather, is a course that most other schools don’t have. It is a senior design course where you design your own pipelined processor with a cache at the gate level. If you are interested in designing microprocessors, I hear that it is an awesome course, and that Intel, etc. really like students from Illinois because of this course.</p>
<p>Other CompE majors, do your departments offer a class like this? Maybe it isn’t that uncommon of a course. This could just be the Illinois hype machine speaking.</p>
<p>Illinois CompE also has a required operating systems course (ECE 391) where for the final project you work on writing your own operating system. That’s a cool project.</p>
<p>silence-I attend University of Maryland and I know we have a course that sounds very similar to both ECE411 and ECE391. I think they are fairly common CpE courses.</p>
<p>Yep,
Was in the 2nd class of CompEs that graduated from Rose. The first I think had one student…</p>
<p>Wrt the computer design class, the gate-level design thing does exist at a number of schools. Personally I have doubts about the value of doing that. It helps understand the size of things, but might just lose some of the higher-level ideas. Not sure. I teach a much higher-level class where people used more advanced HDL techniques rather than building from the gate level. Certainly some sense of size is lost that way. It’s a big debate.</p>
<p>zman5, does your ECE411 equivalent have the huge design project? Probably most CompE programs have a required advanced course in computer architecture, but I was under the impression that few have that big of a design component.</p>
<p>Same with the operating systems class–although every CompE program has a required OS/systems programming class, few have ‘write your own operating system’ as a project. I think that this is more common though–I think CMU does this with their class.</p>
<p>I have to say something that I don’t often hear here at CC. If I was interviewing you and found out that you were an IL resident who went to Madison for CompE, I would really wonder why you did that vrs. going to UIUC. Without knowing your reasons, I would assume it was for a frivolous reason, like the town is better, or because money isn’t an issue, i.e. you’re either rich or wasteful, or because you didn’t get in at UIUC.</p>
<p>I don’t know how many other interviewers think that way, maybe none do.</p>
<p>Wow, I didn’t even think of that. It doesn’t sound like something that happens to everyone but now that you mention it I can definitely see a recruiter asking that question.</p>
<p>For an undergraduate education I think it will be very hard to cost justify RH vs. UIUC with in-state tuition unless you can get finaid or scholarship money. Save your money, in case you end up going to grad school.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about RH, but I can tell you a little about UIUC. Champaign is a nice college town with plenty of things going on. Plenty of restaurants, shops, movie theaters, etc. There is a city bus system that I think students get to ride on for free. UIUC has very good theater and music schools. So, you can see great plays, symphony, or even opera if your’re into that. Of course, there 's big 10 sports, as well. </p>
<p>One thing I can suggest is to attend the Engineering Open House held each year at UIUC in March. You will see the depth and breadth of the engineering program there. I went a couple of years ago and they brought in Grant Imahara from Myth Busters as a guest speaker. It was a lot of fun.</p>