<p>Taxi,</p>
<p>I am not trying to attack you. Sorry if it came off that way. I was just trying to offer my own side of things as a grad since I didn’t quite see things the same way you had depicted them in your post.</p>
<p>I can’t really speak from experience about business other than the fact that it has a great reputation. I did room with two business guys for 3 years of undergrad, so I had a lot of exposure to the students, and I can definitely see where your claim that they don’t need top students since they are already highly rated is reflected in what I perceived to be a somewhat disappointing student body. On the other hand, its a lot harder to quantify the concept of “top student” in business. In engineering, it is easy… who has the highest math scores and took lots of sciences in high school and did well. You admit those kids. In business, there really is no high school curriculum that can capture whether someone is going to be a good businessman, so I guess in the school’s defense, there really is no way to know how good a student will be in business until he starts there.</p>
<p>However, I have never really seen IU as having much different of a program. All the people that I know that went to the Kelly School of Business (sometimes ranked HIGHER than the UIUC School of Business) seem very similar to the ones from Illinois. It seems to me that the main difference in your mind is just how the administrators treated you. That is certainly a valid point, and I used similar criteria in choosing a grad school (got into Georgia Tech but went to Texas A&M, and one of the factors was the way I was treated by faculty on my visit). Personally, I am a huge advocate of going to the school where you feel comfortable and where you feel that you personally can excel rather than basing it on rankings, so kudos for using some common sense.</p>
<p>I just mainly wanted to try and clear up some things you said because in my time at UIUC, I didn’t see them nearly as negatively as you portrayed them in your negatives.</p>
<p>Also, I wanted to add something to the segregation issue. Maybe your friend noticed something that I didn’t, which would be even more likely if your friend is of some minority race, as I am not. However, things like FAR/PAR being mostly filled with black and various types of Asian students never really bothered me because, in my mind, it was no different than the fraternities that are all black, or going to the Asian American house on campus. I kind of felt like a lot of the people who moved in there did it to be a part of their own culture rather than separate themselves from the other groups. To me, there is a distinction there, though maybe there isn’t to others. It certainly would make an easier to transition to college if you get into a dorm that has a lot of people you are more comfortable around, especially on a campus that has a noticeable dearth of black people. It always seemed that while Asians and Indians were well represented, and even Europeans in the engineering school, there was a conspicuous lack of blacks, especially given how many people feed in from Chicago.</p>