BuddyMcAwesome

political science... lol its true!

EliteGeek

^ ??????????? ^

boneh3ad

haha, this was funny to me. Crazy politicians.



And as to the question about UIUC, it is tough to get in, but not impossible. The admission rate is fairly high, but that is partially due to the fact that the applicant pool is self-selective (call the cliche police) and partially because in a large state school like UIUC, it is more impressive to graduate from their engineering program to get in, as there is a fairly high attrition rate.

The materials science department at UIUC is second to none. It generally trades off and on for #1 with MIT, so you can't go wrong (academically) by going there. The big caution about UIUC is that you have to try and make sure you keep yourself from getting caught up in the party scene to the point where you start letting your grades slide. That is the cause of probably half of all the people who don't make it to the end of engineering.

Calcozzo

Where are alternative energy jobs usually located?

boneh3ad

Um.... all over? Where are research universities located? Where are the oil and gas companies located? Where are high tech jobs located? There are companies that work on alternative energy everywhere. The problem is, you aren't very specific. Let's narrow it down to wind power. Working in alternative energy would mean you either develop new types of turbines, which means you probably will be working in academia or at GE or Honeywell or a similar company (or perhaps a smaller startup). Those jobs are all over the place. Let's say you wanted to work on biofuels. You would work for either academia or one of a bunch of small companies around the country that each cater to the type of biofuels available in their geographic area. Nuclear power is everywhere and gets researched in many different universities and companies.

Solar power is about the only one that would be easy to pin down where it would be located.... sunny places. Other than that, you could work towards making fusion practical, which means you would be getting a graduate degree most likely at one of only a handful of universities that have major fusion research programs, which are, again, located in a variety of places.