Agreed PurpleTitan - just basing that comment from the personal experiences I heard about. Also UIUC is known to have the highest percentage of international students in the nation (big Chicago Trib article on that a few months ago). It’s a good thing in many ways but does make collaboration a bit more difficult. My friend’s son had a hard time finding study groups his first year - partly because he was ahead in math (so not many freshmen in some of his classes) and partly because many of the groups were by ethnicity. He is quite outgoing so that was not the issue. He’s in his senior year now, has done quite well but slogged very hard through it all - top student with lots of EC’s going in.
Engineering (and other quantitative majors) at UIUC is no joke, that’s for sure.
Then again, that would be true about engineering at any half-decent school.
Since my stats are above average for my safeties, would it help at all being the big fish there as far as STEM majors go?
Is it typical to curve grades? If so, being at the front of the wave would definitely help. Also look at what you want to do for your next step - work or grad school. If grad school, you need to keep your grades up and look for research opportunities.
Currently I’m not sure whether I want to pursue grad school but I’m also not 100% set on a major or career path.