@TheDidactic In all honesty, admit weekend was pretty weird! I didn’t love it the first day that I was there, and overall the experience at the beginning was very, very awkward. The campus was beautiful, but in a way I do prefer Rice’s campus, even if it isn’t as strikingly beautiful as Stanford’s.
What really won me over, though, were the students that I met. I spent a lot of time with the SLE kids, and they embodied everything that I loved about the kids I met at Rice: They didn’t take themselves too seriously, they were fun, quirky, and just plain easy to talk to. Almost everyone that I talked to said that their admit weekend experiences sucked, which I think is inevitable when you throw together a bunch of insecure teenagers. And yeah, admit weekend felt extremely superficial—there was way too much in-your-face, fake enthusiasm; every other admit that I talked to didn’t really respond beyond typical icebreaker questions (have you committed? where else did you get in? where are you from?); and being outside of South Texas for the first time resulted in HUGE culture shock. I was also a little bit bothered by the preprofessional vibe that I got from some of the other admits. Coincidentally, most of these types were deciding between Harvard/Stanford… hmm
I had absolutely no idea about SLE before admit weekend, and the community is really a gem. Once I found that group, I felt like I’d found a place that I could be just as happy as I was at Rice or even happier. I loved how all of the doors in the dorm were plastered with rainbow flags, art, weird pictures I couldn’t understand… the community seemed totally normal and was really refreshing after the snobbery that I encountered on the very first day of admit weekend.
Overall, was it perfect? No—far from it. But now I’ve seen that there’s a place for me at Stanford where I can finally be the person who I want to be without being judged for it. Yeah, prestige+money did play a role, but that was what ultimately sealed the deal for me.