PROGRAM ELIGIBILITY

The M.Eng in Engineering – Digital Agriculture and certificate is targeted to working professionals and international candidates in the agriculture industry related to fields of technology, automation, computing, infrastructure, data handling, management and genomics.

Recent graduates of engineering and CS+X programs (UIUC) who plan to pursue careers in the agricultural industry and Illinois Computing Accelerator for Non-Specialists (iCAN) graduates looking for a career in food and agricultural sciences would also be considered strong fits for the program.

Applicants should hold a 4-year bachelor’s degree (or equivalent). Applicants whose undergraduate degree is a three-year program may not be eligible for graduate-level admissions consideration at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Eligibility depends on the country where the applicant received their degree – please see the Graduate College’s list of eligible degrees.

The recommended undergraduate GPA for applicants applying is a 3.2/4.0 for the last two years of undergraduate study. 

UIUC policy requires applicants to hold at least a 3.0/4.0 or higher GPA in the last two years of their undergraduate study to be eligible for graduate studies. Applicants are not required to provide GRE scores; however, as per UIUC Graduate College Requirements, all applicants whose native language is not English are required to submit the TOEFL or IELTS results as evidence of English proficiency. TOEFL or IELTS scores must be less than two years old from the first day of class at the proposed term of entry to be valid. 

Applications for this program do not require letters of recommendation. However, they will be considered if included, especially if used to justify experience in place of required coursework or other irregularities. 

To succeed in graduate-level Computer Science courses required for this program, candidates must have prerequisite coursework or commensurate experience in object-oriented programming, data structures, algorithms, linear algebra, and statistics/probability. Applicants interested in pursuing automation and data science-related themes in this Program are strongly encouraged to complete courses in these areas at a local university, via the iCAN program, or as non-degree online courses from Campus Graduate Certificate Programs before enrolling in this program. Applicants who cannot present transcripted grades for the courses mentioned above would be required to pass the Data Structures Proficiency Exam to be eligible for admission.

Applicants who are uncertain if their prior skills would be sufficient to succeed in the themes mentioned earlier of this concentration are also encouraged to take the Data Structures Proficiency Exam. The exam is hosted on PrairieLearn (a University of Illinois online assessment platform) and is proctored by ProctorU (an online third-party proctoring service). The exam is 3 hours long and a minimum of 30 calendar days’ learning period is required between any two consecutive exam attempts.