<p>Enrollment Fall 2011
Undergraduate students 76
Graduate students 69
Graduates 2010-11 Academic Year
B.A. 3
B.S. 12 </p>
<h1>Number of faculty 19 </h1>
<p>Apparently Rice graduated 15 CS students in 2011 and has 76 undergrads enrolled. My son is interested in studying CS at Rice, but this just seems like too few of students for a department. I know it is ranked high for graduate CS work, but undergrad seems disfunctional with that few of students. There was a post a few years ago on CC where someone said freshman and sophomores in engineering don't declare their major, but that contradicts the fact that only 15 students graduated with a BS or BA in CS. If anyone can explain or justify the numbers, that would be great.</p>
<p>I thought the same about the history department. For graduate school they only accept like 7 or 8 students a year. However, those that get chosen get to have a REAL one on one mentoring experience with their thesis advisor. I’m not sure how it’s for undergraduate but if they have that few students, I would be willing to be they be having a similar experience. Compare that to schools where you have hundreds (thousands!?) of students & nowhere near the same opportunity to get to know your professors. I’d be elated if I got the opportunity to attend Rice.</p>
<p>DD will be one of the small number of CS grads this spring from Rice. There are many advantages to a small highly-regarded program. D starting working with a prof after 1 semester, paid summer appointment over freshman summer. Lots of mentoring and 1 on 1 interaction with highly regarded profs. Has attended several national conferences (sponsored by Rice and/or the conference), holds publications with profs. She has held well-paying internships and has a permanent job lined up with a “national” company starting immediately after graduation.
The program at Rice is tough, challenging… but is highly regarded. What more could you want? Why should a big impersonal program be better?</p>
<p>The numbers don’t seem too crazy when you see that Rice offers over 50 majors. In 2011, 802 undergraduate degrees were awarded. If you were to to average the degrees over the majors just to put it in perspective 800/50=16. Of course not every major is evenly distributed like this and some people double/triple major.</p>
<p>MSmom&dad, that makes sense, though my son may be astonished by all the attention after attend a HS of over 2500 and 50 students in some of his classes.</p>
<p>^^ I completely concur with what MSmom&dad has to say. My son also graduated as a CS major from Rice 2 years ago and had a very similar experience, and is still in touch with a faculty mentor. He had such amazing research opportunities that he was able to publish in an international journal after his first year. Of the 12 CS grads his year, 5 ended up working for Microsoft and my son got into a top-ranked PhD program, and was able to get a NSF fellowship based on the strength of his undergrad research. You couldn’t really ask for a better program.</p>
<p>Edited to add: many of my son’s class in his junior and senior year were with grad students, which allowed him to place out of many classes towards a master’s degree.</p>
<p>I want to first say that those numbers mean absolutely nothing. It’s hard to gauge the amount of people in the department because students are not required to declare their major until the end of the sophomore year.</p>
<p>Second, the reason that we are graduating so few CS majors is because the senior class is the last year under the old CS curriculum. The old system had a heavy “weed-out” mentality and discouraged many people from ever deciding to pursue CS as a degree. There is a massive jump in the number of CS majors from the senior class to the junior class, and there are even more underneath that. The department is growing like crazy, due partially in part to the updated curriculum.</p>
<p>To sum it up, Rice’s CS program is extremely good and has a ton of faculty members that really care about your education and are going to make sure that you leave Rice with the knowledge to be a great computer scientist. Although it may look small to you when comparing it to other CS programs, but remember that Rice is small in general. Having 76 CS majors declared out of 3500 students I think is a major accomplishment.</p>
<p>As with any major at Rice, there are going to be some weird combinations. I would say most people just major in CS, but take a bunch of other courses in various fields that interest them. Some double majors I have seen include Classics, Economics, Math, and English. Some also go for the Business Minor. It’s really all over the place.</p>