Rice
I liked my time at Rice, this is something I wrote for a high schooler considering it.
I went to Rice from 2016-2020, things may have changed.
Culture of Care
Rice administration loves to yap about the “culture of care” at Rice, and initially I was skeptical, but (for all their faults) I think admin really puts a lot of effort into promoting this culture. In a concrete sense, there are a lot of mental health pushes and places to go if you need help. In a less concrete sense, there’s just an expectation in the air that you are supposed to help others. I think Rice is consistently in the top 5 / top 2 for student happiness, and it absolutely deserves it.
College System
The College System is the most talked about part of Rice, and yet somehow still underrated. At Rice you are randomly sorted into a dorm (which we call colleges, I know it’s confusing) which you stay with through your bachelors. Each college (dorm) gets a budget to throw activities, and so you meet a lot of your friends through your college.
Because people are sorted randomly, you meet a lot of diverse people. I talked to friends who went to other universities and they all said “Oh I only hang out with CS people because that’s who I’ve met through my classes”. Thanks to the college system, most of my friends are actually outside of CS, which has been incredibly important in teaching me a lot of diverse things.
Furthermore, the college system is a great way to make friends during the painful period of transition into uni. The orientation week goes hard and you get to know your orientation group extremely well. This means that right off the bat you have 8 fellow freshman you know somewhat well and 4 upperclassmen you can rely on for support. Funnily enough, right after I finish writing this, I’m going to go hang out with my orientation group because we’re having a little reunion.
Weird opportunities
Rice has a lot of opportunities I’ve heard of literally nowhere else. If you want to get mental health training and be a defacto mental health advisor at your college, there’s a bunch of people at each college who do that. If you want to get EMS training and be Rice’s front line, you can do that (EMS helped me out after I broke my leg, I love them). The student association and college presidents at Rice do a lot and get a lot of experience.
Hell, Rice even lets you build and teach your own class if you want. I taught 3 semesters of a video games + philosophy course, and talking about that experience and the skills I learned was a large part of why I got into graduate school.
CS student culture
The CS students at Rice are great. You have a few hyper competitive people, but most everyone likes helping each other out, and I have a lot of good memories of staying up late working on projects with friends (Didn’t even need to stay up, but it’s more fun that way). Honestly I’m not really sure what to say here, since I think everything I could say about the CS culture is a microcosm of student culture in general, which I’ve already talked about enough.
Size Matters
I think the biggest negative about Rice is it’s size. Rice is big enough that most things aren’t hampered by its size, but there are still a few sticking points.
Right now I work in a specific field called HCI, and because Rice was too small to have an HCI program, I literally did not even know it existed until practically my Junior year. To actually pursue anything in HCI I had to take internships outside of Rice unfortunately. Furthermore, most of my senior year involved taking classes I didn’t care for since there wasn’t enough flexibility (since some classes didn’t even exist)
I don’t think this should scare you away, all you really need to do is try to keep your eye to the sky and keep yourself aware of what Rice isn’t offering and then seek those opportunities out when you can.
What’s the catch
So far I’ve been really positive about Rice, and I don’t mean to mislead you: Rice does have a lot of negatives. Hell, I could go on for pages and pages about the negative things that have happened to me and my friends at Rice. The reason I haven’t talked about them that much is because (a) these issues happen at other universities (e.g. students fight with admin at Rice, but students fight with admin at every university). and (b) these issues aren’t systematic at Rice. Sometimes something shitty happens (e.g. you have 5 projects due at the same time) and it isn’t really Rice’s fault, it’s just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There are some people for whom the Rice system didn’t work, lots of activities that just didn’t… click with certain people. Generally though, I think Rice is a positive influence on the people who come through (and even if it’s negative, it isn’t more negative than other unis)
If you really want to know my negative thoughts, I can give them to you, but again, I feel like they were specific to my experience.
Anyways…
A place that supports you, a place where you actually feel alive will give you far more success than a highly ranked college. If I went to Stanford or MIT, I’d probably get more access to high quality CS projects and I’d have a fancier title on my degree, but I feel a lot more successful coming out of Rice because I had the ability to put effort towards what I valued without being overwhelmed by the college experience.
