The University of Illinois is known worldwide as being one of the most prestigious and challenging engineering and business universities. It has produced a multitude of incredibly successful entrepreneurs, brilliant engineers, and a handful of Nobel Prize winners. Students from all over the world aspire to come to this university in hopes that it can allow them to excel and become the person that they have always dreamed of becoming, so when you ask me, “Why Illinois?”, I think the answer is quite apparent.
As for me specifically, I decided to come to the University of Illinois for many reasons. The biggest reason was that I knew that I wanted to do engineering, so it was a rather obvious school to put on my application list. The campus atmosphere was another selling point for the school. I’ve been fortunate enough to have an older sibling living on campus for the past two years, so I’ve been able to visit many times and get a general feel for not only the academic strength of the university, but also the extremely fun and exciting social life on campus.
When I told my mom that I wanted to pursue an aerospace engineering degree, she went out and starting searching for the best schools that I could reasonably get into. This list included Purdue, Boulder, Georgia Tech, UCLA, and many others. I was able to get into almost every school I applied to, and even though some of the other universities had higher ranking aerospace engineering programs, I settled on the University of Illinois because it was a campus where I felt at home, and I knew that I needed to be in a place where I felt comfortable each and every day. From information gathered during my many visits to campus, my college counselor in high school, my family, and the consistently incredible rankings from sources such as the Princeton Review, I knew that I would enjoy my time at the University of Illinois, both socially and academically.
My greatest goal for my education is to graduate from UIUC with a degree in aerospace engineering, along with a high GPA to go along with it. After that, I hope to work with a company like SpaceX or Planetary Resources, in hopes that I can help future generations discover new resources and habitable planets to one day move to and colonize. The human race has done a tremendous amount of damage to our Earth in the past few centuries, and if we don’t change how we are living, the Earth won’t be able to sustain us.
I want to be a part of the team that develops new ways for humans to survive on different planets, because based on the direction we are headed, we won’t be able to stay on Earth for that much longer. Unfortunately for me, I’m growing up in a time where it is too late to explore the Earth, and too early to explore other planets, but I want to do everything I can to make sure the human race has a way of getting to new planets, and the education that the University of Illinois can give me will be the first, and one of the biggest steps I’ll need to take to achieve my goal.
