Category:Famous Illinois Alumni
Max Levchin and Luke Nosek both studied computer science in the same engineering college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and both went on to found PayPal. This category collects biographical entries on people who studied at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the roster divides cleanly in two: a computing and engineering line that runs from the Grainger College of Engineering into Silicon Valley, and an Illinois public-service line that runs from the same campus into the state's congressional delegation.
Background
The university is the flagship public campus of the state of Illinois, sited in the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign in the middle of the state, roughly seventy miles southeast of Peoria and a little over two hours from Chicago. Its engineering college is the reason the technology entries exist, and its position inside Illinois politics is the reason the political ones do. James Brady earned his bachelor's degree there before becoming White House Press Secretary, and his biography describes the university as a common starting point for young professionals entering Illinois politics and government service in the mid-twentieth century.
Because it is a state flagship, the category holds people whose careers never touched Illinois again alongside people who never left. Jon Corzine took a Bachelor of Arts there before Goldman Sachs, the United States Senate and the governorship of New Jersey. Kelly Loeffler took a Bachelor of Science before a career at Intercontinental Exchange, the chief executive's office at Bakkt, a Senate appointment from Georgia and the Small Business Administration. Chuck Fleischmann earned his bachelor's degree at the university before practicing law in Chattanooga and representing a Tennessee district.
The PayPal line
Levchin studied computer science after immigrating from Kyiv as a teenager, co-founded the company that became PayPal in 1998, and served as its chief technology officer before founding Affirm. Nosek studied computer science in the same College of Engineering and was a founding member of the company; the Grainger College has since recognized him for co-founding PayPal, for the instant-transfer mechanism, and for building an early online advertising network. Scott Banister attended the university, co-founded the email security company IronPort, and served as an early adviser and board member at PayPal.
Jeremy Stoppelman studied computer engineering at the university during the late 1990s, rose to Vice President of Engineering at the company that became PayPal, and after the eBay acquisition went to Harvard Business School, where the idea for Yelp took shape during a summer internship. He co-founded Yelp with a fellow PayPal alumnus and has led it since 2004. That is why these careers sit together rather than in separate clusters: for this category a single company's founding story is also a campus story.
Government, finance and the current cohort
The political entries are mostly Illinois seats. Jan Schakowsky took a Bachelor of Science at the university and has represented the state's ninth district since 1999. Nikki Budzinski grew up in Peoria, studied at the university and now represents the thirteenth district after a career in union organizing and state government. Jesse Jackson Jr. earned a Juris Doctor there and represented the second district from December 1995 until his resignation in November 2012. Peter Roskam took a Bachelor of Arts before twelve years representing the sixth district.
Finance and the federal government take the rest. Neel Kashkari studied engineering at the university and raced on its Solar Phantom team in the 1997 Sunrayce, then worked as an aerospace engineer, oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program as interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability from October 2008 to May 2009, and became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Outside those tracks, Alan Ruck earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre before playing Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and a long screen career after it.
The most recent members are a live cohort rather than a historical one. Peter Chien studied engineering at the university and Kazuki Shin worked in one of its research laboratories, and the two co-founded a Medicare-focused care-management company together; it entered Y Combinator in a batch where startups founded by University of Illinois students and alumni were unusually well represented. Ankith Subramanya took a computer science degree before founding a reinforcement-learning company, and Jack Brown holds a physics degree from the university and founded a natural-language software testing platform.
See also
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