Your Take on Rice University

swkmom
Mon, 03 Sep 2007 11:54:44 +0000

For my son, the visits to Rice, which gave him a much better sense of the place, were what allowed him to decide.

Talking with Rice students (their friendliness, as well as their intelligent conversations), listening to a few lectures, spending the night in the dorms a couple of times helped him to determine that it felt like he would fit in really well.

He loved the Claremont Colleges in a similar way. In fact, he visited them mainly because of his attraction to the Harvey Mudd curriculum & its intellectual, but fun & quirky feel. But when he visited, he checked out both HM & Pomona & ended up deciding he preferred Pomona to HM. Again, this was based on how they “felt” to him. (To be fair, because we could visit only during summer, when only a few students were there, you couldn’t say that he experienced them in the same way he experienced Rice; if he had, perhaps he would have made a different choice.)

Even though he was admitted to all three (among others), his final decision was among Rice, Pomona & University of Texas’s Dean’s Scholars Program. All three satisfied his need for a very strong intellectual COMMUNITY that was small enough to be close-knit (Dean’s Scholars, though within the huge UT community, is a very small group) and that would give him lots of leeway in trying out different options in his math/science-leaning, but undecided specific major.

In the end, it really was just a “gut” thing - he felt more “at home” at Rice than in the Dean’s Scholars group. As for declining Pomona, I think he just wasn’t quite ready to go that far away from everything he’s known, since he’s lived almost all of his life in Austin.

You will know better what’s right for you if you visit the campuses, but if this thread sounds like a school you’d love, definitely check it out more! It’s a wonderful academic institution with lots of smart, fun people.