mostly irrelevant, but were your parents grad students/professors? I'm a freshmen at uiuc right now (and I intern at wolfram actually), I like finding out about the area (and people who live[d] here)
I have a stupid Steve Jobs anecdote of my own, which I wrote when he retired from the CEO position: https://plus.google.com/102623420630486053048/posts/fTYoDEFV...
One of the best parts of interning at Apple was their tradition of each top exec giving a small lecture to the current crop of interns. Not just Jobs, but guys like Phil Schiller and Jonathan Ive. It was fantastic.
They'd each do an informal Q&A after their speech, and I remember one of the kids jokingly asking Steve if he could be a dancer in a silhouette iPod ad. Steve turned on some music and had the guy come down in front and demo his dance skills, sagely advising him afterwards to stick to his day job. It was great.
Congrats on attending UIUC, I really loved the school and got a lot out of going there. Is Wolfram still on Neil St? I loved that amongst the car dealerships and Meijers was this mecca of mathematics and technology.
In terms of things to do:
- I highly recommend you join the Engineering Freshman Committee and the EOH group, I was the chair of that group and we were given $2000 to do whatever we want (we built a lightbulb unscrewing robot to compete at EOH). It was definitely one of the best experiences of my life ($2k in college seemed like an infinite pool of money).
- Start poking around Beckman Center, I did lots of interesting research there and it still puts out some really cool stuff that freshman can get involved with.
- If you can get a car and need to impress a date, Curtis Orchard is really pretty right now.
- I loved the 318/319 courses and wish I had taken it earlier, when I was there Garland and Hart were there and I wish I had a chance to take more classes in that track.
Best of luck!
Honestly I have mixed feelings about the school. There's stuff to like but I feel out of place a lot of the time. I've been a combination of blue and busy lately, but I should probably check out Beckman and NCSA and some other stuff.
No car and no dates as of late. :P
318 (I think it's 418 now, with Hart this semester) seems cool.
1. Don't skimp on where you live (live in a good place in a great location like right above Murphy's). The rent seems like a lot when you're a student, but in hindsight it's the best deal you'll ever get. Don't live far away from north campus to save money.
2. The ACM at UIUC is pretty amazing, they have a secret lab underneath DCL where they have every thing you could ever want to build a robot, hack on Arduino (I think I salvaged a HP oscilloscope).
3. If you're looking for some more money - there are a lot of companies out by Assembly Hall (motorola etc). Good jobs/pay, really painful to get to.
College is definitely an adjustment but I found my groups I enjoyed hacking with, going to Brothers' with, going to Murphy's with and got a lot out of the experience.
1. Being OOS, money is slightly more of an issue to me, so saving money to live somewhat further way seems like exactly something I may need to end up doing, but I'll see if the difference really matters.
2. I should really start hanging out in the acm office more...might fix (mitigate) some of the problems I have with the school.
3. Well, like I mentioned, I'm at wolfram right now, with pretty decent pay, so I think I'm sticking with that for a while.
My grandparents took me as a kid, and it made an incredibly lasting impression.