I’m a high school senior in California. I got into UIUC, UCLA, and UCSD all for ECE, which is the major I want to do. But I can’t decide where to go, so I’d appreciate your help.
UIUC placed me in James Scholars and also gave me a 10k scholarship, guaranteed for the first 2 years. I know UIUC has one of the top ECE programs, but it is also in Urbana Champagne.
UCLA placed me in their Fast Track program, which is basically honors with some research opportunities.
UCSD has lower ranking than UIUC or UCLA, but I hear they are on the rise due to massive fundings.
Cost isn’t really a problem since they are similar. Please share your insights!!!
Congrats on the OOS scholarship to U of Illinois, thats wonderful !
UIUC in ECE, EE, CS and physics, is the top curriculum, very similar to MIT ,CMU, Berkeley, Caltech.
The campus has a lot of performing arts, football games, clubs, and you will get away from your CA high school classmates, and meet different students from all over the USA and also from China and other parts of the world.
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Some of the perks of your James Scholars program are–you get a mentor and are asked to define a program
that helps you find your career path. You get to register ahead of non honors students.
You need to maintain a 3.5 GPA to be in this program-
@coolweather Not really - UIUC is better in ECE than either UCLA or UCSD. However, it is not that much better that it justifies the extra OOS tuition. San Diego and LA are also better places to live than Central Illinois (I’ve lived in LA and in C-U, and I’d rather live in LA)
For the OP, I would recommend UCLA, no questions.
PS. It’s Champaign, not Champagne, which is what you drink when you graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
At UCSD you have more chance to get internship/part-time jobs during school year. UCSD is next to Qualcomm, a big company and other electronic and software companies.