I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
State universities get a bad rap because their public view not exciting. Some examples: in Iron Man Tony Stark was wearing an MIT sweatshirt and in Swordfish, Stanley Jobson was a graduate from CalTech. State universities will never be able to replicate that kind of effect, an effect which is very important to young people.
That being said, once you examine reality, state universities can be quite exciting. Here are some bullets for you (sorry it's from UIUC again, but it's the one I know the most about):
* Paypal's founder and two cofounders of YouTube went to UIUC.
* Awesome speakers pass through regularly (I saw Larry Wall last year, I saw Alan Kay a couple of days ago, and I'm planning to see Stephen Wolfram tomorrow).
* There are a lot of hacker-like places on campus. For example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented the first popular graphical web browser. There's also Wolfram Research with Mathematica and Wolfram alpha.
* The Department of Energy and private utilities are essentially dumping money into the Information Trust Institute for securing the powergrid. In fact, there's a conference next week with tons of interesting speakers on this topic.
* A $30,000 dollar prize (the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize) is awarded each year to the student who "has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways."
Comments
I appreciate your other comments about chances at Brown and Columbia relative to chances at the other universities
Sure. This NYTimes article is useful in that it gives you the raw numbers behind admissions to Columbia and Brown: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-few-more-col.... You can see they're brutally low.
I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.
State universities get a bad rap because their public view not exciting. Some examples: in Iron Man Tony Stark was wearing an MIT sweatshirt and in Swordfish, Stanley Jobson was a graduate from CalTech. State universities will never be able to replicate that kind of effect, an effect which is very important to young people.
That being said, once you examine reality, state universities can be quite exciting. Here are some bullets for you (sorry it's from UIUC again, but it's the one I know the most about):
* Paypal's founder and two cofounders of YouTube went to UIUC.
* Awesome speakers pass through regularly (I saw Larry Wall last year, I saw Alan Kay a couple of days ago, and I'm planning to see Stephen Wolfram tomorrow).
* There are a lot of hacker-like places on campus. For example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented the first popular graphical web browser. There's also Wolfram Research with Mathematica and Wolfram alpha.
* The Department of Energy and private utilities are essentially dumping money into the Information Trust Institute for securing the powergrid. In fact, there's a conference next week with tons of interesting speakers on this topic.
* A $30,000 dollar prize (the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize) is awarded each year to the student who "has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways."