Featured Program : University of Wisconsin-Madison : ECE

This is a new feature on this blog. I am planning to write an article about a graduate program or invite guest authors to write about a program they know closely. The objective is to give you a first-hand, from-the-horse's-mouth, impression of a graduate program which is vastly different from the kind of descriptions you get from a graduate school guidebook or a rankings website. So to begin with here's a piece about my own graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Top areas of concentration
Computer Architecture, and Power are highly regarded areas of concentration. There are a large number of faculty members working in Computer Architecture between the CS and the ECE departments, and many prominent developments in microprocessor design were born in UW labs. You have a lot of choices in coursework, Design For Test, Circuit Design, Logic Design, Architecture, along with courses in the CS department in Compilers, OS, Distributed Systems.

Top Employers
For MS students who specialize in computer architecture or allied areas, the top employers are Qualcomm, Intel, Micron and NVIDIA. Another prominent employer although not specifically related to Computer Engineering was Epic Systems in Madison. There are 2 widely attended career fairs during a school year and I was extremely happy with the quality of the Engineering Career Services department. They helped me all through the process, and I had at least 4 onsite interviews all across the country.

Rankings
NRC rankings, or US News engineering rankings will list UW ECE at around 14-16 close to UCLA and UCSD. The CS department is ranked among top 10 CS departments in the country.

Other notes
- It is also one of the largest universities in the US by enrollment and campus area. Usually everyone finds funding either in the first semester or the second semester. There are many departments on campus that you can approach for funding (provided you ask nicely, ie don't spam). I found funding on my 11th day in Madison. It helps to know programming in Perl or Java.
- Madison is the capital of Wisconsin and is located about 3 hours north of Chicago. Winters are quite cold as the rest of Midwest and Northeast but there isn't as much snow as say Buffalo, NY, because it is situated on the western side of a Great Lake. It is an urban campus, so there is a lot to do, lots of restaurants and activities. There are 3 campus gyms.
- It is not as highly selective as say Caltech, Stanford or MIT, but you do need good grades (top 10% of class) and excellent GRE scores, in addition to a good record of extra-curricular activities. University of Mumbai, University of Madras & IIT Madras were highly represented in the years I was around.

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