Hey GoI, how's UIUC's operations research program?
I'm not sure if UIUC puts the same emphasis on O/R as other financial engineering programs do. Like any Midwestern rust-belt university, we have a top-notch industrial engineering program, which I believe is going to be related in a number of ways. However, it's a separate program.
hey every1 wat abt placement rate of UIUC, is it like above 80% or so? I hv heard UIUC admits lot of students..around 130...so are most of them well placed?
The college of engineering tends to have a placement rate comparable with and sometimes exceeding their Ivy League counterparts in
traditional engineering programs, although they tend to have a lower average starting salary, for what it's worth. In the government world, graduates are routinely recruited to work at Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Fermilab, NSA, CIA, and State Department. In industry, we get everyone from Google to IBM to Microsoft to a plethora of fortune-500 companies and a number of hedge funds to recruit programmers.
That said, UIUC's business program- outside of Accounting and Actuarial Science- tends to have a different placement profile than engineering. The business program's placement profile looks more like that of a stronger Big-Ten school (like Wisconsin, Perdue, or Michigan) than an Ivy League. That means a typical undergraduate finance placement rate would look more like 95% in a median year, but your average first year compensation would look more like $60K than $100K.
The financial engineering program is relatively young at UIUC and it was in its infancy when I was a student there. I'm not sure if its recruiting profile will look more like our engineering program's or our business program's. Either way, Illinois has a solid business school and an engineering school that either beats the Ivy League programs or at least is on par with them.
With all the talk I'm doing of UIUC's engineering program, I'd be remiss to leave out Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech does extremely well against the Ivy Leagues in engineering and has jumped four or five places in the rankings over the past four or five years. You find that a lot of state schools compete very well against the Ivy Leagues in engineering and the hard sciences. As the field matures, we'll see just how applicable that is to financial engineering.