As a Physics major,surely I'm here to take science classes but I am also obligated to take some liberal arts classes as a part of general education requirement.  The courseload is quite a lot, may be its because I am in my first term freshman year and I have not really felt like this before.  But the requirements are pretty annoying, such as lab write ups, lab reviews, lab previews, lab quizes etc and all of them are monitored online (yes welcome to public school that has lots of computers) Even my math homeworks are online, they were at first pretty annoying but after a while they're quite easy and doesn't really obther that much.  Lots of works will make you feel like you are one of the xerox machines that would just do the same thing over and over.  Some classes such as my speech and communication class is really orthodoxical, they would force you to format some stupid papers according to some stupid MLA hand books, I thought I'm the only suffering that but I talked to someone I know who goes to prestigious Columbia University and she says that the same stupid thing happens, so may be its always like that with people.  The science class, I have only had Chemistry and Calculus.  Chemistry lecture is okay, I found it pretty fun and class is huge, 200 people on average attending, but that doesn't mean u can not interact with the faculty, infact the professor encourage you to inteact (he gives out candies when you make some suggestions) but it will not be like your highschool, professor will probably not know your name.  But the recitation session is quite bad for my chemistry class, the TA doesn't really know much, not really smart he's sorta like “by the book” person.  Competition wise, it is considerably crazy, you have 250 kids who just want some A's in their freshman year to deal with for each class and yes..that is crazy.  Grading's harsh, you'll feel that you would need to be on the move all the time to get that A or B (study for all quizes, exams whatever) and it would drive you nuts if you don't really like the subject.  Some classes, if you're lucky enough to get the seats, is like a seminar class that would be only 20 people in it.  But most general classes such as calculus, physics at introduction levels are HUGE (250).

For the student body, well, Champaign Urbana has something like 200,000 people (but I don't really feel like its that much) and there's 37,000 students in UIUC.  So basically you got a town of students, you can do all the bell curve or whatever to get the distribution of intelligence and stuffs and you'd probably have all of them.  The most competitive majors here are in engineering, they are quite very well trained in technical areas prior to coming to this school and they all want A's so you'd have to work pretty hard to get good grades in classes with them in it.  The science people take roughly the same classes as engineering but they are not as well respected (engineers are pretty arrogant) but not me though, in my Math class the engineers call me “genius” but that's me.