<p>Hello everyone,
I was just wondering if anyone had any tips for me as I am applying to Rice University. Rice is always looking for students that stand out, and I was wondering what things were important in order to help me stand out... I have also been wondering what to put in "The Box". Does Rice want to see something extremely personal or something Houston/ Rice oriented??</p>
<p>I'm planning on applying ED to Rice as I totally fell in love with the campus when I toured it and love the Houston area. </p>
<p>However, I have also been pondering applying ED to Barnard College. I realize that they are two totally different schools and would love to hear Pros/ Cons of both schools. </p>
<p>What you need to know: your ability to afford either of these schools. Have you run the net price calculators and had The Talk with mom and dad?</p>
<p>they really are quite different schools in quite different cities. One of the next things to consider is strengths in majors: Rice’s strengths tend to be in STEM, with a couple of additional strong majors in English and PoliSci. Barnard is a liberal arts college, and their strengths are broader, less focused on STEM and lacking in any engineering majors. One result of this is that a Barnard education can be more interdisciplinary, if that is to your liking. Rice is about twice the size of Barnard, and there are guys at Rice. Many women love a single-sex college education, but there are others who don’t. Houston is not NYC. I’m told Houston and the area around Rice are nice, but did I mention that it’s not NYC, one of the navels of the world and the #1 city in America for internships and entertainment. And of course Barnard is across the street and shares facilities and some programs with one of the best universities anywhere.</p>
<p>I have not seen the science facilities at Barnard, but I suspect they’re something in which you’re interested. How did you find them to be?</p>
<p>In summary, I think of Barnard as an ivy, as somewhat under-rated in most rankings. But Rice is an almost ivy in my book, and if it weren’t south of just about every city in the country would be much better known than it is. A couple of very good schools, OP. Where will you fit in better? what are you thinking of majoring in?</p>
<p>If you have not yet visited Barnard College, I would urge you to do so in order to have something to compare to what you saw and experienced on your tour of Rice University. The demographics are probably quite different, and you will likely get a very different “vibe” from Barnard; not a worse one, just a different one than what you had from Rice.</p>
<p>Start with this simple question: New York or Houston? I am a Barnard alumna, and a hardcore “Blue Stater,” and so that question would be very easy for me to answer. Barnard might not be the ideal choice for Engineering, but it has always been very strong in natural sciences. When I matriculated in the 1970s, Barnard boasted that it had produced more woman doctors (ie. physicians) than any other college in the country. That was quite a feat for a small, private college. </p>
<p>@woogzmama, how are the science facilities at Barnard today? have they been pouring any money into building or upgrading their laboratories and classrooms? can Barnard u/gs get access to some of the science equipment they have at Columbia but don’t have at Barnard?</p>
<p>I can’t provide a perfect answer to jkeil911, but I think Barnard students can cross-register in most classes. I was never a scientist - Barnard allowed students to take their Science requirement Pass-Fail, and I did (Columbia did not allow that, by the way). I just did a little research on the site, and it appears that the Physics department is heavily cross-listed, whereas Barnard’s Chemistry department is more independent. Pre-Med students may fulfill their prerequisites across the street, but Barnard’s Chemistry major has a different sequence from Columbia College’s. Like most women’s colleges (and secondary schools), Barnard has focused a lot of energy on initiatives to enhance STEM offerings, but it still is not the best place for a prospective engineer - that would be Columbia SEAS. </p>
<p>thanks, @woogzmama. I sent a response just a few minutes ago and it appears to be lost in space. So I’ll abbreviate: neither school has a library science major. Barnard’s creative writing is much stronger than Rice’s.</p>
<p>I missed out on the Library Science element in OP’s query. Columbia has a graduate program, but it’s a fairly unusual undergraduate major at most elite liberal arts colleges. Mastering the stacks at Butler Library ought to count for something in itself. I think they have automated a lot of the search process, now, but hunting a book down was an adventure, and - sad to say - often involved unpleasant episodes for young women alone. </p>
<p>yikes! no one should have to encounter bull like that in order to retrieve a book, and it would help to have staff patrolling the stacks and offering help to people trying to locate books and articles–as well as keeping an eye out for predators and patrons alone in the stacks. I’ve often thought how creepy the stacks are, and how isolated you are within them.</p>
<p>I think that things might have changed, as my daughter never complained about issues with hunting down books. I id help her with the task of returning books at the end of her senior year – she had about 100 books stacked up in her dorm room accumulated for her thesis work, and they all had to be returned prior to graduation – and we had to do a lot of walking because they came from about 6 different libraries So we did an interesting library-circuit around the campus. My d. also had some research-assistant jobs along the way for various professors and departments, so finding books was probably part of her job. But I think that a lot more has shifted to reliance on electronic resources, both for locating the books and reading research journal articles. This is conjecture only, but it might also be possible these days for students to make an advance online request for specific books to be held for them, rather than needing to hunt through the stacks on their own- certainly that would make sense. </p>
<p>the research focus has shifted more in some fields than others. the back story in literary criticism, for instance, is still to be located in books on dusty shelves ignored by most undergraduates until their junior or senior theses. Lonely places, and those darned timed motion detecting lights are just creepy when they shut off on you and you have to walk to the end of the row of books or journals to get them back on. If I were easily spooked, it would take about one stacks incident and I wouldn’t be using those stacks anymore. </p>
<p>^^^that’s reassuring. I’d be looking at the campus crime report. call the columbia univ police department and see what it takes to get their crime records for the last 6 years. </p>
<p>Jkeil - By “automated,” I mean a system whereby students request books electronically, and they never have to go into the stacks themselves. As for crime, I attended Barnard in the 1970s, when NYC’s crime rate was considerably higher, and the Morningside Heights neighborhood considerably funkier, than now. I considered the immediate campus environs one of the safest places on earth: well-lit, people up and around at all hours, well-patrolled, etc. It has only gotten safer since then. </p>
<p>@woogzmama – when you were in college, Columbia was still male-only – so perhaps the dynamics of the relationships among the students has changed as well, now that almost half of the Columbia students are women.</p>
<p>I don’t know what things were like in your day, but these days Butler is very strict about who is even allowed into the library - only students with CUID’s can enter (and faculty of course). A student cannot bring in a visiting guest – not even when the guest is the student’s mom, who is begging for the chance to get inside that gorgeous building and look around… guess how I know about this poicy? </p>
<p>So perhaps this strict barrier at the gate was implemented in response to some unfortunate incidents in the past? </p>
<p>Anyway, the area certainly has changed a lot since the 70’s, and is very safe these days-- probably safer than many other campuses, simply because it is urban and there aren’t many dark and isolated spots on either campus for evildoers to lurk. When my daughter was still in high school visiting colleges, she refused to consider one LAC because it had “too many trees.” When I questioned that, she elaborated that the trees made the campus dark and spooky at night. The first time I ever visited my daughter at Barnard, I arrived at the campus slightly after midnight. The campus gate was about two steps away from the subway exit, and even at that hour, there were plenty of people around. </p>
<p>The creepy activities in the Butler library stacks were almost certainly perpetrated by insiders, who had CUID cards. As I said, the Barnard-Columbia campus and immediate environs are extremely safe and nobody should be dissuaded from attending out of security concerns. NYC had enough of a reputation when I applied, that Barnard was easier to get into than many comparable colleges. I knew girls whose parents allowed them to apply to Penn, but not Barnard, although Philly was even more dangerous than NYC. Harvard and MIT students were both murdered during my freshman year, and yet nobody ever discouraged students from applying to colleges in Boston. There was also a serial rapist at large on the Tufts campus at the time. </p>
I’d be looking at the campus crime report. call the columbia univ police department and see what it takes to get their crime records for the last 6 years. </p>
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