Universities in the US are very competitive. The university equivalent of the Fortune 500 is the US News list of America's Best Colleges which ranks universities here by faculty. Rankings have all kinds of affect on research funding and getting the best faculty and students. Last time I looked Columbia - which is more famous for Law, Business or Journalism - had some kind of middling to average rank for computer science. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (try saying that after a night of solid malt whiskey drinking) is way up there among the top 3 computer science campuses in the country. As well as having stellar faculty and doing really important research, its also famous for being the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the birthplace of the supercomputer HAL in the film 2001, the one that went crazy and tried to kill everyone.
I went there to pay a long-overdue visit to my friend Pierre who is completing a PhD in computer architecture. We were undergraduates together at Wits in Johannesburg. The computer science department at UIUC is vast and exudes well-fundedness and the campus is beautiful. The last time I saw a gym like the student one was a luxury spa in Hamburg. I spent a really good time with Pierre and some of his research group ... we went out on the town (at UIUC you get a pick of two towns to go out on - we were in Champaign) and took advantage of bars offering a huge choice of beer, talking until way into the night about pretty much everything but computers. Cheers to studentville!
No comments:
Post a Comment