I got rejection emails from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and, surprisingly, Purdue. I was getting discouraged and a bit scared when I got my first acceptance email from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That first line: "It's my pleasure to congratulate you..." eliminated all worry and made me jump out of my chair in excitement. You may remember that UIUC has always been near the top of my list. Soon after receiving UIUC's email, Wisconsin-Madison's arrived. It said I could come, but they would not give me any money if I did. I am still waiting on Texas-Austin.
Last weekend I went to the UIUC CS department's Prospective Graduate Student Weekend. They put 14 other CS students and me up in a hotel and tried to woo us to the department just like we tried to woo them a few months ago.
I arrived in the midafternoon on Saturday and found a fire truck in the hotel parking lot. I learned from the front desk that the sprinklers had gone off, soaking a maid with stagnant water and turning a stairwell into a waterfall. I checked in amidst the excitement, then wandered around campus for a while.
Even though Illinois and Purdue have a comparable number of students, Illinois' campus seemed much larger. The buildings appeared to have more floors (perhaps because half of Purdue is underground) and tree-lined malls seemed to spread them out more. I walked from one end, where all the engineering and technical students spend their time, to the agricultural greenhouses near a large cemetery, then back through the liberal arts section. Oddly, the campus is peppered with random farm houses tucked in between hulking red brick buildings. I forgot to get my camera out of the car before walking around, but you can find other peoples' pictures of the campus .
In the evening, the other prospective students and I went to a pizza social with current CS grad students. The event was held in the ground floor of UIUC's new CS building, the absolutely beautiful . I networked admirably with a small handful of graduate students and briefly with , a new professor in the software engineering group with whom I had exchanged a few emails.
My name on the big screen in Siebel Center
Later that evening, a few of the prospective students and I were planning to go to Green Street, the main entertainment strip through the campus, but pelting rain forced us to the restaurant near the hotel instead. The six of us then embarked on the absolute best bull session I have ever had. We made fun of our (and each other's) undergraduate schools, talked about CS, and generally had a merry time for several hours.
The organizers filled Sunday to the brim. In the morning we listened to professors talk briefly about the various areas of study available in the department. Then we had a surprisingly informative question-and-answer session with a panel of professors. After lunch, we split off to go to individual meetings with professors. I talked with Professor Marinov about automated refactoring tools, automated exhaustive unit testing techniques, and programming languages for use in testing, all topics that I can assure you are much more interesting than they may sound.
Lunch in Siebel Center
I had a bit of time to burn after that, so I joined some of the theory group graduate students who were talking with an impromptu group of prospective students in a lounge area. At one point , the main host of the weekend, brought out a that could travel at about the pace of a relaxed jog when the rider rotated the handlebars correctly. Those of us in the lounge took turns racing it around the second floor with varying degrees of success. Professor LaValle said that he had bought the scooter with research money to find out if its method of propulsion could be applied to his field of robotics.
Steve LaValle with the scooter (apologies for the blurriness)
At around 4:00 the prospective students reconvened for a building and campus tour. My group had an unfortunately shy and reticent guide, but we saw a bit more of Siebel Center and the northern part of campus.
Touring Siebel Center
A memory core from ILLIAC
View from the second floor of Siebel Center
A strange mannequin in the server room that was apparently used for wearable computing applications
The whiteboard in the server room
We finished the evening with dinner at a plush Italian restaurant in Champaign.
I reflected on the weekend during my two hour drive back to Purdue that night. It was difficult last semester and last year to decide that I wanted to pursue graduate school. I have a good deal of work experience from my summer internships, and I would not have had a problem finding a job if I chose. Would I be capitalizing on that experience as much as I could if I went to graduate school? Speaking to professors and current graduate students this weekend gave me a clearer view of what my next few years in graduate school may contain. I am sure I will work harder and longer than I ever have before, but it will be on the bleeding edge of the area I choose. Nowhere will I have the opportunity to expand myself and my chosen craft more than in an institution like UIUC. Whether I end up there or at UT, I am convinced that graduate school is where I need and want to be at this point in my life.