UIUC VIPs

This afternoon I attended a one-hour meeting at Intel of UIUC alumni with several UIUC VIPs, including the new chancellor Richard Hermann, the Interim Dean of Engineering Ilesanmi Adesida, and the ECE Department Chair Dick Blahut. In case you didn't think UIUC cared about Intel, or vise versa, there's apparently just under 300 UIUC alumni at the Intel Oregon campuses alone. Of course, only about 30 of them showed up today.

The meeting had some standard "UIUC is a great engineering school" talk and such, including a discussion about midwest modesty and how UIUC isn't known quite as much as MIT, Berkley, Stanford, etc. because UIUC doesn't brag as much. This led to the most interesting thing I think I learned, which is that UIUC is apparently a *very* highly respected university name in China, of all places.