<p>Hi,</p>
<p>International student here. I got admitted to 4 univ. but have finally decided on attending either UT Austin or UIUC. In both colleges I have applied for Electrical engineering. Again, I did not get any sort of fin. aid in both places so I will be paying full tuition.(37K at UIUC and around 30K at austin)</p>
<p>Can anybody help me in deciding which of these 2 colleges I should attend?</p>
<p>Thanks!!!!!!</p>
<p>You are not going to go wrong with either. Both are excellent universities, nationally recognized for engineering with nice campuses. Austin is a real city. Champaign/ Urbana are fairly small, partly college towns and once outside the city limits you will find nothing but farmland and forests for 50 miles in any direction. Austin's weather is significantly milder with only a short period that can be called winter. At UIUC, you will have cold and snow (it can vary from a lot to not much depending on year) from late November to early March and can get extreme cold (single digits to below zero fahrenheit) for some days from December through February (that also varies annually from several days to sometimes many weeks). Austin actually has some hills. UIUC is in "flatland"; you can drive an hour in any direction and never see any "hill" higher than a construction crews' mound of dirt dug up for their project. Teaching methods and class sizes (many large particularly for basic courses in first two years) are similar.</p>
<p>Thanks drusba</p>
<p>My counsellor suggested that because UIUC is located in the middle of nowhere, not many companies will be enticed to come scouting for students unlike UT Austin which is in a big city. Is that true?</p>
<p>UIUC costs about 8K more than UT Austin every year but at the same time it has a much higher ranking (along with 19 nobel laureates) and almost ivy-league status, something that UT Austin is perhaps lacking. This is what is really making choosing between these 2 colleges really difficult.</p>
<p>Every major tech company comes to UI. It's only a couple of hours from Chicago.</p>
<p>Can't go wrong with either school...But, UIUC has a stronger EE program. If you could do it, visit both campuses. UIUC is within a few hours drive of other great universities (i.e. Northwestern, Purdue, Indiana University, U of Michigan, U of Wisconsin, U of IOWA, U of Minnesota, etc.) and UT-Austin is closer to mainly schools within the state of Texas.</p>
<p>UIUC has "almost ivy league status"???? Wow, that's new to me :).</p>
<p>Illinois Innovators Dominate 2006 CE Hall of Fame Class</p>
<p>Innovations and innovators are nothing new to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That fact was reinforced recently when the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced its new class of inductees into the Consumer Electronics (CE) Hall of Fame. Four of those honored--one third of the 2006 class--hailed from the University of Illinois.</p>
<p>New Hall of Fame Inductee Nick Holonyak Jr., the John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Physics at Illinois, invented the first light-emitting diode in 1962 while at General Electric. An Illinois alumnus (BS 1950, MS 1951, PhD 1954), Holonyak is internationally recognized for major contributions to elemental and compound semiconductors, including semiconductor lasers and incoherent light emitters. </p>
<p>In collaboration with ECE Professor Milton Feng, Holonyak co-invented of the transistor laser that combines the functionality of both a transistor and a laser by converting electrical input signals into two output signalsone electrical and one optical. Holonyak is the first to make electron devices using III-V semiconductor alloys and to demonstrate quantum-well heterostructure lasers, now used in compact disc players and fiber-optic cables. He also was the first to demonstrate stable native oxides on aluminum-bearing III-V compounds, now the basis for vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers. </p>
<p>With more than 500 journal papers and 34 patents to his credit, Holonyak is one of only 13 Americans to have won both the National Medal of Science (1990), and the National Medal of Technology, presented by President Bush in 2002. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2004, he won the Lemelson-MIT Prize-the worlds largest single cash prize for invention.</p>
<p>Three College of Engineering alumni--Donald Bitzer (BS 1955, MS 1956, PhD 1960, Electrical Engineering), Robert H. Willson (BS 1959, Engineering Physics; MS 1961, Physics; PhD 1966, Electrical Engineering), and the late H. Gene Slottow (PhD 1964, Electrical Engineering)--were inducted into the CE Hall of Fame for inventing the plasma display in 1960, the precursor to todays high-definition plasma televisions. The monitor was a result of work the faculty at the ECE and Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) had been doing in developing the first computer-assisted instructional program in the world: PLATO, Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations.</p>
<p>As one of the most distinguished faculty members in the electrical and computer engineering at Illinois, Bitzer realized early in PLATOs development that a display with memory was needed to make the system successful. He and his colleagues--Slottow, then a senior research engineer, and Willson , who was working as an assistant in the Coordinated Science Lab helping to develop PLATO--subsequently devised an electronic display in which each pixel on the screen glowed like a little neon sign. The plasma panel was both a display and a storage device. </p>
<p>The plasma monitor accepted digital information directly from the computer and stored it on the panel, solving the scalability problem that plagued the use of cathode ray tubes in computer display monitors. This invention has enabled the development of large-screen flat-panel televisions for modern TV and DVD technologies, which earned the inventors the Scientific and Technological Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2002. </p>
<p>Since retiring from the University of Illinois in 1989, Bitzer has been a Distinguished University Research Professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Slottow became an associate professor in electrical engineering at Illinois in 1968. He retired from the university in 1986, and passed away in March 1989. </p>
<p>Willson received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1966, moving to Baltimore, Maryland, where he spent his career working for Westinghouse and other companies in systems analysis. Twenty-five years ago, he decided to put that work behind him to pursue his passionstudying the convergence of science and spirituality--as an ordained minister and dean of a seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. </p>
<p>Other inductees in this years CE Hall of Fame include Robert W. Galvin, who steered Motorola from 1959 to 1990, and Andrew Grove and Gordon Moore, two of the three co-founders of Intel (the third co-founder, Robert Noyce, was inducted in 2000). Joining the group are industry executives Jack Doyle of Pioneer America, Howard Ladd of Sanyo, John Roach of Radio Shack, retailer A.J. Richard, and George Heilmeier, inventor of the commercial liquid crystal display (LCD). </p>
<p>The accomplishments of the individuals who are entering the Hall of Fame this year are simply amazing, said CEA President & CEO Gary Shapiro. Their inventions and leadership laid the groundwork for todays digital products and technologies, enhancing the way consumers around the world work, live and play.</p>
<p>The 2006 class will be inducted at the annual CE Hall of Fame awards dinner during CEAs Industry Forum next fall in San Francisco. The 12 inductees will join the 97 inventors, industry executives, engineers, retailers, and journalists already inducted since the CE Hall of Fame was created in 2000.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the info.
The only drawback with UIUC is the cost. UIUC costs almost 38K per year while UT Austin costs only 30K a year.</p>