We visited this campus in November and again in March for the Ubound new student event. The campus…read moreis gorgeous. It is very clean and everybody is super friendly. Over the two weekend visits we were able to tour one dorm, almost all the sororities, various classrooms, many buildings, including the library, cafeteria, student union, Kibbe Dome, student store, and Bruce M Pittman Center.
For any prospective student. I highly recommend going to a small organized tour of the campus that they hold at various times during the year. We were able to do a tour back in November. It was very helpful and very organized. We also pre-scheduled a meeting with the department head for the major my daughter is interested in. This was really helpful because she had a sit down meeting for about an hour to discuss her perspective major, and how it would fit for her. Also, we were able to tour the whole campus, eat in the student union, shop at the student store, and see a dorm room.
The Ubound event is a much bigger event. It is designed for students that are accepted to the university and are still making a decision and or finalizing details of enrollment. There is not possibly enough time to see everything during the Ubound event. Although it was organized, it seemed much more chaotic with overlapping timeslots for many events. You had to really pick and choose what you wanted to see and do within the small timeframe of a few hours on a Friday and then a few hours on a Saturday. We focused on the tours of the sororities, which took the most time. We only had limited time to walk through the social club fair with all the tables. This was one of my favorite parts because they were giving out a lot of swag and giving great logo stickers almost everywhere we went. We missed out on about 50% of the tables that we really wanted to see due to time constraints. Unfortunately, everything closed down midday on Saturday. Fortunately, we did all of the business stuff and that was super helpful. The room called taking care of business was the most helpful with tables set up with financial aid, administration, health, food, housing, Greek life, etc. There are so many questions to ask.
U of I makes it very helpful to hold these information sessions. I just wish they spread them out over a full day and a half so we could've done everything . With the time it takes to travel and the cost of staying overnight, it's just not feasible to come to the campus too many times to gather all the information needed before the first day of school.