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UIUC ECE MENG

Program Overview​

Supports co-op, offers flexible course selection covering both software and hardware, suitable for career changers to CS. You can graduate by taking entirely CS courses, such as ECE428 Distributed Systems or CS411 Database Systems. In previous years, it supported CPT for summer internships with spring enrollment, and co-op allows delayed graduation.

Supports deferral for one year. Students with weaker software backgrounds can use this year to do internships in China to strengthen their profile, which helps with finding full-time positions in the US later -- quite friendly for job hunting. The program currently allows deferral freely, and this was also the case even before the pandemic. There are also many graduation pathways; see the chart below for details.

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The biggest highlight of the UIUC MEng program is that the advisor is very accommodating. The program has a special mechanism called "petition." What makes it special is that you can petition to count non-ECE courses as ECE courses. This means even if you don't have enough ECE credits to graduate, you can talk to your advisor and they may still let you graduate. As long as you maintain a good relationship with a professor, you can even transfer to a PhD program.

Admission Preferences & Data Points​

Rolling admissions -- apply early, get admitted early. The admission threshold is friendly.

  1. EE undergrad, no internship, GPA 85, TOEFL 100, admitted
  2. 211 university Mechanical Engineering undergrad, no internship, GPA 89, with a complete set of CS prerequisite courses, TOEFL 102, admitted
  3. National Taiwan University EE undergrad, GPA 3.76, with one SWE internship at a small Taiwanese company
  4. National Taiwan University EE undergrad, GPA 4.0/4.3, one year full-time

Job Outcomes​

The Summer 2025 landing rate was average, with roughly 10% of students finding internships.

In 2022, both full-time and internship landing rates were around 50% (students around me received offers from all kinds of companies -- Amazon, Google, Meta, TikTok, NVIDIA, etc.). 2023 was slightly worse than 2022.

  1. UIUC ECE undergrad, with T-Mobile internship, landed NVIDIA SWE intern and successfully converted to full-time
  2. National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (Taiwanese undergrad), one year full-time experience, landed Meta SWE new grad
  3. National Tsing Hua University, one year full-time, landed ASM full-time
  4. National Taiwan University EE undergrad, GPA 4.0/4.3, one year full-time, landed Twitter