UIC’s true legacy: its graduates
“We will always be honored to call you UIC alumni,” says Chancellor Paula Allen-Meares. Photo: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin/UIC Photo Services
Dear UIC Class of 2014:
As our academic year draws to a close, the moment is right to review what makes UIC such an outstanding institution — our faculty, staff, alumni and you, our students.
As you walk down the aisle in your cap and gown, you can be enormously proud of your alma mater.
Our rankings continue to rise, along with our visibility. The Times Higher Education list of “100 Under 50,” the world’s best universities that were founded less than 50 years ago, listed UIC as No. 13 — one of only eight U.S. universities included. We’re third in the U.S., after only University of California, Irvine, and University of California, Santa Cruz, moving up six places from last year.
U.S. News & World Report‘s “Best Colleges” most recent rankings put UIC at 63 among public universities. We are also proud to be recognized among the schools whose graduates had the least amount of debt — and to be ranked among the top 10 national universities for ethnic diversity and in the top 30 for economic diversity.
This academic year we began the planning and construction of the first new buildings on campus since 2008.
The Advanced Chemical Technology Building, now in the design phase with construction expected to begin in spring 2015, will support cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in such areas as environmental science and immunology.
We just celebrated the opening of the Curtis Granderson Baseball Stadium, made possible by UIC grad and New York Mets player Curtis Granderson. The stadium will be home to Flames athletics and Chicago youth baseball.
UI Health’s newest Mile Square Health Center, officially opened in January, is the first federally qualified health center in Chicago to offer both urgent care and a full array of specialty medical services. It is expected to serve many newly insured patients under the Affordable Care Act.
UIC is the new home for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, a group of 25 university-based Latino research centers that promotes policy-focused studies of U.S. Latinos in politics, economics, culture, art, history and immigration.
The Richard J. Daley Collection, documents and artifacts from the late mayor’s six terms at Chicago’s helm, became available for review in the UIC Library to the public and researchers.
With 1 petabyte (a quadrillion bytes) of disk storage, the new High Performance Computing Cluster expands UIC’s research computing capabilities in many areas, including informatics and “big data.” These advancements will provide student training in cluster- and cloud-based computing to make our graduates even more attractive in the job market.
UI Labs received a grant of $70 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Defense to create a Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute in Chicago. UIC’s role focuses on its strengths in computer visualization and developing a technical workforce. The institute will apply cutting-edge mobile, cloud, and high-performance computing technologies to solving manufacturing challenges, from robotics to visualization.
These developments and accomplishments are part of our shared experience at UIC and the history we’ve witnessed together.
To our graduates, I extend my very best wishes for the future. We look forward to your continuing participation in the life of UIC. Please return to campus often to share your achievements. We will always be honored to call you UIC alumni. As our ambassadors, you are UIC’s true legacy.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Paula Allen-Meares
Chancellor
John Corbally Presidential Professor
