CS PhD : UIUC vs UT Austin

[mbakht]

Hi everyone,

I have got admission to CS PhD program at UIUC and UT Austin. The financial offer from UIUC is $1724 per month. On the other hand, UT Austin has offered $1547 per month as TAship. My preferred field is networking and distributed systems - for which I have heard UIUC is better. But to be honest, I am not yet that determined about it - my mind might change after taking some grad courses. The one drawback that I have heard about UIUC is that - they are taking too many students in the PhD program and hence, the value of UIUC CS PhD is less than that of other similarly ranked programs (like Cornell).

I will really appreciate valuable opinion from TM-ians.

[mbakht]

Eagerly waiting for your valuable opinion .

[WhenHarryMetSally]

UIUC, any day.

[gforce]

UIUC is very good for Networks...
Cornell's PhD program *might* (not necessarily) be more reputed that the one from UIUC but Austin doesn't stand a chance against the mighty UIUC.

[attraxion]

Please tell your stats... GRE, acads, recos, research...? congrazz for the great admits...

In general (to everyone), I am new here and finding lots of difficulty in extracting useful info out of the forums... seems to be a closed community where everyone knows everyone else and talk about their admits and all without giving poor me (sob! sob!) any idea... something I'm doing wrong?

my main aim these days is to find out my chances of admission in the *top* schools..

[an_observer]

UIUC is marginally stronger than UT in networking, but both schools are kinda not so great places for networking/distributed systems (for example, they just cannot compare to Cornell, UWash or UCSD). I don't think you can go wrong with either place, though - both are great places . Have you got offers from any other schools? Rice and UMass have excellent networking research groups too, I believe.

[lemaymd]

UIUC has the Xserve cluster and NCSA, but it's not so good for distributed systems and networking?

P.S. Check your private messages, mbakht