@jeh3924 : Yeah, I agree. There are lot of factors in college admission - gender/URM/first generation college/rural etc like you said. It is truly sad your son with such stellar stats wasn’t admitted.
This is our 2nd time (and the last), we learnt from the 1st time and grew wiser. When our D1 didn’t get CS at UIUC (even being a girl, in CS it plays a little less role compared to other majors in CoE, just my personal opinion), we were at first extremely disappointed, I would say even devastated. It took a while for us to come to terms with that decision. We always thought Illinois is where she will go. When she decided to go to GT, we still were unsure if that was the right decision and of course it costs us so much more, as we don’t get any aid. In the end it turned out OK, she is getting a great education, has got decent internships and hopefully she will get a good job when she graduates in little over a year. But as you said, she will never come back to IL, so it is sad that our state is losing. However this is the same feeling with every state flagship schools. In GA, they complain about how Tech admits so may OOS and international students. If you see other college threads in CC, it is a consistent message. It really is a vicious cycle. While I am all for attracting the best OOS and international talent (I am a beneficiary of latter), I agree when it affects you, it hits hard.
I said this in a different thread - unless state schools do something about the growing demand of certain popular majors like CS, engineering majors and business this is only going to get worse. I am not at all against liberal arts, but our state colleges are so far behind times and not keeping up with demand in STEM while rest of the world outputs so many in those fields. I don’t understand why a big college like Illinois with such a top ranked CS program can only have 200 spots in CS in CoE (and a couple of hundred more in CS + X), when they get 4k-5k applications. I know there are cycles, but if the general projection is this is going to be the trend, they should expand. I know it takes a lot - faculty, facilities etc, but that’s where they should be investing and unfortunately IL’s budget crisis isn’t helping either.
S got wait listed for CS. Out of State. Perfect ACT score of 36. GPA 4.5. Good summer activities and other extra curricular activities including sports. For future readers, I have to say that CS is super competitive at UIUC and do not take it lightly.
Result : Rejected
Major: Business Unassigned (Only choice)
SAT: 1580 (790 M and 790 Eng)
SAT II: 800 Math , 740 Physics , 800 chem(Although i don’t know UIUC doesn’t consider them)
Indian Student 10th grade ICSE : 95.67%
EC’s: State level cricketer, founder of a startup in the smartphone sector, National Level Quizzer, Speaker and host of several talks on leadership and entrepreneurship, business development and accountancy internships in my junior year, part of school dramatics team, captain of school cricket team.
Essays: They were connected to my startup and how internships helped me learn better.Also talked about how UIUC business is a good fit and how I’ll contribute to the school
I seriously think this is the beginning of a long line of rejections for me!
Maybe they thought I was gonna drop out after my startup succeeded and I gained enough out of their student networks.
ACCEPTED: Mathematics & Computer Science (LAS)
Residency: Illinois
ACT: 30 (English: 32, Math: 33, Reading: 23, Science: 33) Note: also submitted an ACT with a 28 reading score
GPA: Weighted: 4.2 / Unweighted: 3.78
Activities: Programming-centric YouTube channel (>30k subscribers, >4.5M views), developed entire social media app for startup, coding club president, on the board of science/engineering club, volunteer CS teacher, 2nd place in Chi Hacks hackathon (MLH sponsored), made business off of jailbreaking PS3s
Ethnicity: White
Gender: Male
@cmd7131 - very much agree with all your observations. It’s our third go-round, and won’t be our last, so we went into it with our eyes open, but yeah, U of I absolutely needs to expand CS. And although every state flagship gets this complaint, the fact remains that U of I is #1 in foreign nationals, and the fact remains that a very high number of them are in the COE. Like @syzygy53’s kid, ours is pretty laid back. I think he views it the same way - as an interesting process to view how each school builds the class. Our next child is also considering CS, so who knows, maybe he will be the one to end up there (previous kids were accepted but chose not to go, but they weren’t CS).
From going to CS town halls, they told us the primary issue is the lack of CS faculty. Not just at UIUC, but in general. B/c industry is so lucrative, there’s a lack of professors to teach. They’re trying to expand capacity, but it’s taking a while.
So I guess I’m the only one who applied for CS+Linguistics?
Asian Male
SAT 1500
SAT2: math 800
Physics 740
Bio 720
Unweighted: 3.6 (super competitive high school)
I know this is isn’t just an issue with UIUC, all colleges are struggling to meet the CS demand. I can understand why it is hard to expand - it is much more lucrative to work in the industry than teaching. And a college degree is enough for an industry job whereas for teaching you need doctoral degree, so it takes time to produce good quality teaching professionals. Over time there will be a self correction, until then it is going to be like what we have been seeing since the past few years.
Accepted.
Male, Asian.
COE - environmental engineering
Hometown: SF, CA
UW GPA: 3.65
SAT: 1450 (subject tests below 700, didn’t send)
EC: 4year varsity baseball (current team captain), 1 semester science journalism program @ Cal Academy of Sciences, probably 250+ volunteer hours (environment & youth outreach related), 1 semester middle school tutor, 1 semester peer mentor, volunteer assistant Little League coach, freshman soccer, piano & guitar for years independently, city wide technology contest for carbon emission reduction (3rd place, most skilled team), 2 years 18u travel baseball, 2 years 19u summer baseball, street skateboarding (labeled as art lol), community college dual enrollment English class
Essay: decent but worked well with my ECs and major
FUTURE APPLICANTS you can get into engineering w a bad gpa too (although CS is hella hard).
@Ccada3300 As mentioned in previous posts on this forum, a reason you might have gotten rejected is that your scores were too high compared to the rest of their freshmen applicants in this major. They knew that you were considering them only as a safety school and won’t attend if they gave a seat as you would be aiming for higher/better universities. If you look through the posts in this forum you can see that many business unassigned applicants have much lower scores than you (1200-1400 SAT and average GPA). You should be aiming for better business programs. Based on your scores and interests I hope you have applied for University of Southern California’s Computer Science+Business Administration program. The program will help you learn skills you need to work on even more startups, or progress on your own, as well as give you business lessons on how to advance your business. The deadline was on January 15 though…
@FutureCSstudent I haven’t applied to USC. I think I missed out on the opportunity.
Yeah might be one of the reasons I got rejected.
However, I also don’t think there’s something too special on my application other than my scores.
That might be a reason for rejection too.
My friend who got a 1470 got in to UIUC Business with similar extracurriculars but his essays were amazing to say the least.
Nevermind, let’s see what the future holds.
Cheers and all the best to you!
