Study at the Illinois University

The University of Illinois prides itself to be a world leader in research, teaching, and public engagement. The school also emphasizes on the variety of programs it offers and its internationally renowned faculty. It operates campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield, enrolling about 70,000 students. The campus at Urbana-Champaign is known as "Illinois", "U of I", or “UIUC”, whereas the Chicago campus is known as “UIC” and the Springfield campus as "UIS".

The University of Illinois was founded in 1867 with the Urbana-Champaign campus, and was chartered as the Illinois industrial university. The institution is one of the original 37 public land-grant institutions created after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, while it currently perceives its faculty as one of the most significant resources it has. A lot of the faculty members are highly recognized with memberships in the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. Furthermore, there are a good number of recipients of the Nobel Prize, Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, Japan Prize, National Medal of Science, Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, and MacArthur Fellowships. The university sends at least one student per year to Cambridge on a post-graduate fellowship. The school is very proud with all of the other prestigious scholarships it provides, some of which are the Rhodes, Truman, Marshall, Gates, Goldwater, Churchill, Luce, and Fulbright Scholarships.

Another important point about the university is that it is home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, developer of the internet browser Mosaic(TM), and therefore is a world leader in supercomputing design and applications.

As far as rankings are concerned, the U.S. News & World Report for America's Best Colleges put Illinois on 15th place among public universities and 47th among all national institution. Moreover, the College of Business is ranked 14th in undergraduate programs nationally, while the Ph.D. Computer Science program is ranked 5th nationally. The College of Engineering is ranked 6th in undergraduate and 5th in graduate programs nationally.