Rice vs Columbia

silentsailor
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:45:44 +0000

I chose Rice over Columbia 4 years ago with a similar dilemma (Columbia would’ve been 10k more, but that was still impractical for me). Looking back, Columbia is the only school out of the 10 I was accepted to that I debated attending instead of Rice, and I’ve occasionally played the what-if game, but I’m happy with my decision. Main reasons I went with Rice include:

Cost. I pay for all my own stuff and I got a full merit scholarship here; I can’t imagine what it would be like to take on debt to go to college, especially since I want to go to grad school. Cost of living in Houston is also lower than that in New York.

Smaller size; big-fish-in-small-pond-full-of-big-fish feeling, rather than big fish in large pond full of big fish. More leadership opportunities per capita, and it seemed easier to start new things at Rice. After talking with friends at Columbia over the past for years, this has been validated over and over. As a senior, I absolutely feel like I can do anything I want here: I can land lunch with whatever speaker the Baker Institute brings in, I make big decisions about my college, I plan events hosting 500+ people regularly - and I’m nowhere near the only Rice student who does this. All of this took work, of course, but it’s great to have the option.

WEATHER. This depends on where you’re from and what you’re used to, but I’m still blissfully convinced that snow is some sort of devious trick northerners play on us and I like wearing flip flops in February.

THE RESIDENTIAL COLLEGE SYSTEM. Best community system I could ever imagine, and it appealed to me more than Columbia’s system.

Both schools had great bioengineering departments and were located in cities with great food, events, and activities. Rice was a better fit for me as a student who was also hoping to pursue some interdisciplinary work (Rice’s focus on the Middle East was something that attracted me, just barely beating out Columbia’s international development courses).

I came back from my visit to Columbia respecting the university. I came back from my visit to Rice in love with it. This is a personal decision, but it’s what it came down to for me.

I actually just went to an engineering competition that had 3 teams from Columbia. The Columbia teams were all typically very slick: they always have visually pleasing powerpoint presentations, their design teams are required to do some basic business planning and to make a website, etc. Rice is more design-focused early on, very think-on-your feet. We also have a strong focus on presentation skills, which is nice. Both schools produce some very good engineering students. For the record, our Rice team beat all the Ivy teams :)

As for Rice’s electrical engineering department: it’s a difficult major, and you’ll put in a lot of work, but I have to say that I LOVE some of the professors in that department. My capstone design mentor has to be the most friendly, earnest, dedicated professor I’ve had at Rice - he stayed in the design kitchen helping us with our prototype until 1 am last week (which I found incredible) and still manages to remain engaging and down-to-earth (if you bring beer to class on the last day, well…). Most profs in the department are at least kind of like that: lots of them come from industry, so they know their stuff and subsequently tend to be charmingly irreverent while they mark off your problem sets.