I get lots and lots of email. This one is about a very good program. Some students of my close collaborators have gone there and have had a good experience.
The Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign would like to broadly advertise our graduate program to undergraduates at your institution.
Students from traditionally underrepresented groups in the physical sciences are especially encouraged to apply. The Physics GRE is not required. The application deadline is January 15, 2019.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Astronomy hosts vibrant research programs that span cosmology, compact objects, galaxies, stars, and planets. Survey science, data-intensive astronomy, and computational astrophysics are particular departmental and campus strengths. Illinois is an institutional member of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Illinois is the global central hub for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), hosting the data archive and playing a central role in data processing and analysis. The Astronomy Department has strong ties to the highly-ranked departments of Physics and Chemistry, the College of Engineering, and the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA).
More information about our program can be found at https://astro.illinois.edu/.