The Illinois Institute of Technology

Date: Sep 19 2006
Major: Computer Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
As a computer engineer undergrad, I compared MSOE, Bradley, Rose-Hulman, and UIUC with IIT. I chose IIT because it was a small, private technical school with superb faculty. I also new a lot of alumni from IIT who owned their own businesses and were successful. Financial aid also helped a lot (although all the schools boiled down to a similar price range after aid and scholarships factored in).

Undergraduates get an enormous amount of attention despite that there are more graduates that go here. Most of the classes are really small and the professors are accessible. TA's are only used to supervise labs, which usually have a 10:1 student:TA ratio. This alone is huge. Ask kids at Urbana how large their cs labs are and who teaches them.

It's nice to be 10 minutes away from Chicago. There is always something to do off or on campus. And if nothing is going on there is usually homework to fill in the gap.

Another neat thing is that IIT does not require as many electives unrelated to your major as other schools do.

But there are downsides to IIT. I would say the male to female ratio is upsetting (especially in the ECE and CS departments). There are a lot of food complaints, but our food provider is consistently improving every year. The major dorm complex is old (and to be demolished in this decade as rumor has it).