<p>PC, your mom is disappointed but she seems willing to let the matter drop. You know how invested she was in the idea of Rice, so don’t expect a huge reversal on her part. You can find other areas to agree on. Good luck with your grad program</p>
<p>Your mom’s behavior will only make becoming a success from your chosen school even sweeter and it will be a great lesson for her.</p>
<p>One piece of advice: let your mom get over it. Don’t raise the subject with her any more, and if she raises it, try not to defend yourself too much. “You may be right, we’ll see.” is often the best answer to give in such a situation.</p>
<p>^^Agree with you Hunt. That is a perfect response if the mom brings it up again and the dad is not present.</p>
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<p>bigtrees, that’s an obnoxious comment. Rice is clearly one of the top schools in the country any way you slice it – what on earth is the point of noting that, gosh, the people in your neighborhood don’t know Rice? Maybe that speaks to them, not to the quality or caliber of Rice.</p>
<p>Doesn’t this post illustrate the point though, that many people think that there is a “back door” to admissions at highly selective schools?</p>
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<p>She said that it’s not like Stanford or MIT; not that it isn’t a top school.</p>
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<p>I’m familiar with Stanford because we hire a lot of people from Stanford. I’m familiar with MIT because we hire a lot of people from MIT and it’s not very far away. I’m not familiar with Rice.</p>
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<p>The student body consists of over 3,000 undergraduate, 897 post-graduate, and 1,247 doctoral students, and awarded 1,448 degrees in 2007.[4] The university employs 611 full-time faculty and 396 part-time or adjunct faculty members in 2007.[2] Rice has a very high level of research activity and had $77.2 million in sponsored research funding in 2007.[8] Rice is noted for its applied science programs in the fields of nanotechnology,[9] artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, and space science. Rice was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1985.[10] The university is organized into eight schools offering 40 undergraduate degree programs,[11] 51 masters programs, and 29 doctoral programs.[12][13]</p>
<p>MIT enrolled 4,232 undergraduates and 6,152 graduate students for the Fall 20092010 term.[4] It employs about 1,009 faculty members.[3] Its endowment and annual research expenditures are among the largest of any American university.[10] 75 Nobel Laureates, 47 National Medal of Science recipients, and 31 MacArthur Fellows are currently or have previously been affiliated with the university.[3][6] The aggregated revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would be the seventeenth largest economy in the world.[11]</p>
<p>The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States, in Silicon Valley. The university was founded in 1891 by Leland Stanford. Its alumni have founded the companies Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Silicon Graphics, and Google.</p>
<p>Stanford enrolls approximately 6,800 undergraduate and 8,300 graduate students from the United States and around the world. The university is divided into a number of schools, including the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School, Stanford School of Medicine, and Stanford School of Engineering.</p>
<p>Regarding usage of “obnoxious” and “clearly” in a post.</p>
<p>There are a lot of good schools not well known outside of their region. Only relatively few schools are known for academics nationwide. Rice doesn’t have a reputation in the (upper) midwest either (I tried outstanding and other adjectives to modify reputation but all seemed to demean the school when I meant it doesn’t hit the wow meter)- if people have heard of it they won’t be awed. It is not obnoxious to point out that a good school is not known as an academic powerhouse outside of its region. There are equally good schools not known or given value by some of those who know Rice. In this region MSU (Michigan State) is known and has a better reputation, meaning people would question why someone would bother going to Rice instead. We could quote statistics from either school to “prove” points about which is better to drag out this thread. I am stating perceptions, not absolutes.</p>
<p>OP- You should enjoy the rest of your college education at MSU and will get a good education for your future plans.</p>
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<p>Big whoops. That speaks to the provincialism of the upper midwest. Here’s something that’s high quality and excellent that many people haven’t heard of – well, big deal. It just shows that they don’t know what’s what.</p>
<p>I refer to the most outstanding post I have ever read on CC, which is from bclintonk discussing his daughter’s acceptance to Haverford, one of the finest LAC’s in this country. By what he says in this post, I’m assuming he lives in Mpls/St. Paul. The bolding is mine.</p>
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<p>The OP’s question in this thread wasn’t about Rice, though on the surface it was. It was about the tension of differing opinions versus a parent. The thread should have / would have unfolded the same way whether the “school that parent thinks a friend can get me into” was Harvard or Eastern Montana State. The student didn’t want that school and was struggling to figure out the lines of autonomy and independence. </p>
<p>Bringing in “Well, Rice isn’t THAT big of a school, at least in MY neck of the woods” is a) a gratuituous swipe at Rice for no reason, b) irrelevant to the thread, and c) just makes the writer look small.</p>
<p>BTW, I have no dog in the Rice fight (ha ha). Never been there, my kids have no desire to look at it, no friends / relatives there. But the gratuitous swipe was silly.</p>
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That did sound like an unnecessary negative swipe to me as well, pizzagirl.</p>