A World-Class Engineering College at a World-Class University

 

The College of Engineering was one of the original units of the University of Illinois when it opened in 1868.  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has since become one of the world's great centers of learning, scholarship, and research, and the College of Engineering is one of the largest and most respected colleges of engineering in the country.  Distinguished faculty, outstanding students, unique resources, and a breadth of academic programs and research disciplines in the college create an environment ideally suited for exploring important questions and problems of our time.

            Among the university's most significant resources is its talented and highly respected faculty.  Many College of Engineering faculty members belong to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, or the National Academy of Engineering.  Several are recipients of the National Medal of Science, and more than sixty have received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award while on the faculty.  Some of the important Nobel laureates of this century were educated or worked in the College of Engineering. 

            Academic resources on the campus are among the finest in the world.  The University Library is one of the largest public university libraries, housing almost 22 million items in the main library and in the more than 40 departmental libraries and units.  Among these is the landmark Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, the largest engineering library in the country and one of the most technologically advanced information management and retrieval centers in the world.  Named in honor of William Wallace Grainger, the facility sits on the spot where one of the first buildings on campus was erected in 1871.

            A world leader in supercomputing design and applications, the university is home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, developer of the hypermedia browser Mosaic^(TM), which revolutionized the use of the World Wide Web.  Today, researchers use innovative, high-performance systems to address large-scale problems of great complexity that were impossible to tackle just five years ago.  Students also have access to more computer technology than ever before, with thousands of computer terminals in classrooms, residence halls, and campus libraries for use in classroom instruction, study, and research.  

            Students and scholars find the university an ideal place to conduct inter- and multidisciplinary research.  In addition to faculty laboratories, more than 80 U of I centers, laboratories, and institutes facilitate studies for government agencies, industry, and campus units.  The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology supports research groups from more than a dozen university departments working across three broadly defined themes: biological intelligence, human-computer intelligent interaction, and molecular and electronic nanostructures.  In the College of Engineering, the Technology Entrepreneur Center provides an environment that supports faculty and students interested in taking research ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.

            While research is an important activity on campus, the university has a fundamental commitment to undergraduate education.  Nearly 28,000 undergraduate students are enrolled in nine undergraduate divisions, which together offer some 4,000 courses in more than 150 fields of study.  Undergraduate admission is highly selective.  In a typical freshman class, students in the middle 50% had ACT scores between 25 and 30 and ranked between the 83^rd and 96^th percentiles of their high school graduating classes.

            The university also enrolls more than 9,000 graduate and professional students in more than 100 disciplines.  It is among the top five universities in number of earned doctorates awarded annually in the United States.

            Other rankings and assessments position the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a premier public university, and the College of Engineering is consistently found among the top-ranked colleges in the country.  To learn more, explore this CD-ROM as well as websites developed for the university (http://www.uiuc.edu/) and the College of Engineering (http://www.engr.uiuc.edu/).