<p>Hi, I am currently a sophomore at a top 40 LAC in the northeast. I am looking to transfer, and Rice has long been on my radar screen. Just had a few questions for those who are maybe somewhat familiar with Rice and its character, see if there is any cause for some of my concerns.
I am a history/german major, and I am aware that Rice's academic climate is skewed somewhat in the direction of engineering/life sciences and so forth...how much does this afffect the intellectual atmosphere on campus? In my experience these people are generally either hopelessly nerdy or startlingly conventional. Also, I am in a fraternity on my campus and have grown somewhat accustomed to always having this as a social haven and axis. The Rice residential college system, i have heard, fosters tight-knit social groups that last through the full four years. I have even heard that you "don't pick your friends at Rice." Is there truth to this, and what kind of an environment for transfers in general do you think Rice is?</p>
<p>I am trying to come back south, and to experience college life in a more urban environment amongst peers who are intellectually engaged and engaging and not cliquish, or standoffish.
Any answers or insights would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
hoping</p>
<p>those are very good questions. the intellectual atmosphere is probably the thing i like least about Rice, and i think the engineering culture is the prime suspect. i thought they would be much more active about building things on their own but i have found them exactly as you said, conventional (in nice terms). </p>
<p>they are for the most part anti-intellectual and don't discuss anything but the very mundane. in my opinion, they don't even seem very excited about engineering to tell you the truth. </p>
<p>i think the environment for transfers is pretty friendly, assuming you get on-campus. it is very easy to make friends within your college because you see the same people everyday in the cafeteria and live so close to them. if you live off-campus, things will be very difficult. unfortunately you have no control over your living situation. </p>
<p>i don't think Rice students are at all cliquish by themselves, but the college system almost creates that effect. a lot of people have very few friends outside their college and i think some would like to. like most schools, though, it is hard to make friends through classes. </p>
<p>about your last paragraph, Rice is in Houston but it really doesn't feel urban. Rice is in its own little world. the only difference is that there are a lot of restaurants and museums if you can get off campus on the weekends. students are a reflection of the college system; they separate school and their social life too much and hence are not intellectually engaged/engaging in my personal opinion. and also, i really don't like the german department here, but maybe the upper-level classes are better (i only took the first 2 years).</p>
<p>The nice thing about the residential college system is that it makes a large place seem less daunting. You get to know everyone in your college very well in a small, close-knit environment. People here are generally warm and friendly. Unfortunately, it's really hard to make friends outside of your college. I have a lot of acquaintances from other colleges who I've met through friends and class or just randomly, but I wouldn't really consider any of them friends. I like the people at my college, but it's rather disappointing that I don't get a chance to talk to other people more.</p>
<p>I think it must depend on the students and how outgoing they are. DD is on a sports team and hangs out with them. They are from different colleges, and she knows people through different interests. The opportunities for interacting with the different colleges are definitely there!</p>
<p>Yeah, i was always told that Rice students were somewhat on the intellectual side. It seems like everyone takes courses in philosophy and such, and engineers only make up 13% of the student body according to collegeboard. So I'm a little confused myself.</p>
<p>Last night I had a long dinner conversation about creationism and evolution and school policies on teaching things like evolution and plate tectonics and sex ed, and then we discussed things like pre-marital sex and the bible and sources from other religious traditions and do people at rice fit into certain stereotypes and tons of stuff and people explicitly drew on their coursework to make their points and it was all really good. Of course, we don't have those discussions every night, but yeah. I think people are sometimes intellectually engaged, and other times doing other things. So that's my two cents.</p>
<p>my college is about the same size as my high school class and i honestly found more people in my high school class which was essentially random, smart people (a magnet with a lottery system). my take is that it is not often, not very much. everybody should be able to have an intellectual type discussion on some topic, at least their major, but i've found that a lot of people just do the work and don't think much about just normal questions that (i think) they should be asking themselves. so because of that, i think the mood is very anti-intellectual. all things being equal, i think admissions relies too heavily on picking generally good people from high school. for intellectual conversations, you don't need or really want good people. often it is the bitter or quiet ones who are best to have around, not the outgoing or passionate ones. the former are specifically discouraged here as much as they are encouraged at a place like UChicago.</p>
<p>Maybe that is the norm at almost all colleges, sreis. Do you have something other than UChicago to compare it to? I still get the feeling that Rice is on the upper end of intellectualism even if it is not there all the time.</p>
<p>I think we tend to mix our intellectualism with other things. On more than one occasion, I have heard drunken ramblings turn toward a discussion of Newtonian physics. Similarly, my friends and I have recently been addicted to a recently-purchased PS3, but our conversations mid-game will often stray from what you normally expect to hear during a marathon first-person shooter session. I think many Rice students can be intellectual when they want to be, but they do not feel the need to "prove" these capabilities every chance they get.</p>
<p>actually Clendenenator, that is precisely what i came to. i have been vastly disappointed with what college is. i expected college to be a step up from high school, and in some regards it is, such as resources and phenomenal teachers, but in some equally important regards, it isn't. both were very surprising. i don't mean to single out Rice. the human aspects of the admissions process simply come out very much in the behavior of the student body. schools that do not strongly value the traits i expected every college of this caliber to have (intellectually engaging/engaged, curious, connecting different fields, and so on) probably fall short of my expectations as well.</p>
<p>hmmmm... I'm sorry you aren't experiencing what you think you were going to. My DD is very busy and happy at Rice; is friends with several of her profs (goes out to eat, been to their houses, has discussions with them, etc.), hops on the lightrail to go to free or cheap performances like the ballet , symphony, goes to cool parties like archiarts (sp?), has been involved with student-run musical, club sports, political group, etc. Has an oncampus job that she really likes, went on an alternative spring break trip that she really enjoyed, studied abroad for 5 months. Well, speaking of the d.arling! She just called walking on her way home, and she is all excited because she is going tonight, (for free) with 3 friends to see men in tights hop around at the ballet, then to her friend's house to study, then she gets to sleep in late tomorrow and start working on her internship application. I told her I was online right now, and read her what "sreis" wrote - and she laughed and said, "he's taking the wrong classes and hanging out with the wrong people then. He needs to take some humanities and social sciences classes - because the people having those kinds of discussions out of class are the people who take those kinds of classes!"
I hope you stretch out of your current batch of friends, sreis, and find the people you are looking for. I know my daughter has found them! :)</p>
<p>Last night I had a long dinner conversation about creationism and evolution and school policies on teaching things like evolution and plate tectonics and sex ed, and then we discussed things like pre-marital sex and the bible and sources from other religious traditions and do people at rice fit into certain stereotypes and tons of stuff and people explicitly drew on their coursework to make their points and it was all really good.</p>
<p>I was there!</p>
<p>But really, if you don't think that Rice students are intellectually engaging, you aren't hanging out with the right people. I can't tell you how many times my friends and I have been sitting in the commons, only to find our conversation suddenly turning to how full of crap Rousseau was and how while Kant was an idiot, at least we respect his philosophy because it's well-put-together, etc. I think it's more like Dorian said--Rice students are very intellectually engaged; they just don't feel the need to express it every minute of every hour of every day to feel good about themselves.</p>
<p>i'm glad you have such a good experience but Rice has not lived up to that and it doesn't seem like it can either. i transferred colleges to see if it could, and it hasn't. i have received plenty of exposure of all the classes in each college as well. i do like the college i am at a lot more, but that is a different matter. no one is arguing for students to "feel the need to express it every minute of every hour of every day." and to "feel good about themselves"? maybe you should drop the Rousseau and look up straw-man.</p>