Rice is What's for Dinner.

It’s been a while. The only writing I have done recently is cranking out crappy AP Lit essays in my messy, angular handwriting. I feel almost a little rusty at this. It’s been a while since I’ve written a wall of text in front of a computer. No shit, the last time I wrote an essay on the computer was the Acadec essay.

The reason I’ve put off writing about Rice for so long is because I was so duly unimpressed. I found myself in a sea of mediocrity that was just didn’t inspire anything – neither rants nor raves. It was a passing memory that I was willing to simply let fade.

The most important things I learned during Owl Weekend were not about Rice, but about Harvard. This statement pretty much sums up my experience there. It was at Rice that I learned what I did not want from a school. Admitted students weekends are tricky because your experience is formed mostly by your host—one person out of 5000—who is unrepresentative of the entire school. In any case, my host and I were terribly matched, and I knew this as soon as I saw her nose ring, crayon-thick eyeliner, cowboy boots, and short, short American flag dress.

My first meal on campus was a mediocre grilled chicken with a side of mushy canned beans. A welcome from the President, who sounded such like the Doctor from The Princess Bride as promised, was somewhat entertaining. (The most obnoxious laugh punctuated every attempt at a joke.) During the entire speech, I was regaled by the tales of a Lovett freshman, who recounted his Owl Weekend: alcohol, drunkenness, passing out...all that good stuff. I chuckled along, pretending to be amused, until the officials at Rice decided to remind us underage drinking absolutely would not be tolerated on Owl Weekend. My host turned me be with a big sneer and said, “That’s such BS.”

Indeed BS were such attempts to ban alcohol. After the President’s welcome address, we walked back to Lovett College. At Lovett, I was given a warm prospie welcome with a sight of a “Prospie Trap.” This trap was a beer can attached to a string held by a student on the second floor balcony. If any alcohol-eager prospie attempted to snatch the can, the student would pull up the string while a rigged table would fall on the prospie. All the Lovett students thought this was an ingenious idea, and we stood for 5 minutes watching another student (yes student, not prospie), jump for the beer can. His feats were celebrated with cheers and coos from Rice students, while the prospies smiled awkwardly.

After settling into my host’s room, she decided to take me around to meet more prospies and more students. As we walked to the second floor balcony (apparently the social center of Lovett), another host approached with his prospie, shouting, “Hey Tim! I’ve got another climber for you.” Climber for what? Rock climbing? Nay, my naive readers. For the peculiar toaster-grilled shaped walls of Lovett College give rise to another tradition: wall climbing, a sport especially popular among the drunk. Sure enough, people started handing around cigarettes and beer cans, eager to stuff the prospies with illegal substances.

Most of the students seemed unenthusiastic to interact with prospies, except for getting them drunk. While I attempted to make conversation with some other people, I felt like I was talking for the sake of talking. Our conversations were dull and uninteresting, staying firmly in the domain of name, home state, “Are you coming to Rice?” One of the students finally caught on that not all prospies were eager to get drunk, so they herded us into a room to play Apples to Apples. The game we played was overcrowded, dominated by the students who were all friends while the prospies didn’t get a chance to know each other. During the game, one girl said something is very indicative of why I don’t belong at Rice, “It’s so dumb to put Owl Weekend on a Sunday. Yea Rice is academic, but classes are just classes. They’re the same everywhere. You should be experiencing the social life.”

Classes may be classes, but they certainly are not created equal nor are they the same everywhere. Classes actually are limited by the school you attend, while social life is what you make of it. And from what I experienced of Rice’s social life, it kinda sucked. The work hard, party hard mentality that supposedly exists at Rice doesn’t appeal to me. If “play hard” means getting hammered every weekend...well, that’s just not my idea of fun.

When the game disbanded and some went to play beer pong, I went with a few other prospies to the Rice Philharmonics the show. In all honesty, the a capella group wasn’t that great; I think even AB’s are better. (Harvard’s a capella jam certainly blew them away, and Harvard isn’t even that good.) After the show, my host caught the drift that I didn’t want to drink and had some difficulty throwing together a small intimate gathering instead. We hung out a bit with some of the Phils, who were pretty cool people. I could actually see myself being friends with them, but we quickly disbanded as people claimed homework. Thus ended my first day at Rice.

The next day was Monday also known as a school day. I ended up tagging along to Honors Physics with an extremely disgruntled male student (it was early...) and a bitchy Asian female prospie who deigned to talk to white males. When we arrived, the soft-spoken professor was tugging at a piece of rope attached to the windowsill. He had just asked a question and was looking around wistfully for someone awake to answer. Unfortunately, half of the people were sleeping, and the other half were prospies. The class was dull, and even the sliding blackboards couldn’t keep my attention. Nobody looked very enthused, and I was similarly bored.

The next class was econ, and I followed one of the few Rice students I genuinely liked. She confided to me that Econ 1211 was very rigorous course, and she was actually retaking it. Walking into the small, closet-sized, room with no windows, I saw Albert who gave a strangely unreadable expression. The class was taught by a Russian grad student, who despite giving an extremely easy problem set (ie I could do it), couldn’t get any of the class to answer his questions. I tapped my foot and made hushed plans to visit an anthropology class with another prospie.

The anthro class was the one class I visited that I even remotely enjoyed. The professor liked to crack corny jokes, and the students were giving articulate presentations around their final research topics: Colombia, the blogosphere. Yea, the students were actually awake!

I did some things after lunch that I honestly don’t remember. Met some people. Went to some panels. I feel no need to recount everything at Rice because none of it was very remarkable. Things that stood out did so for the wrong reasons. One Rice student, upon hearing my college options, made a sneering aside, “Hah, she’s not going to come here.” Great, if you don’t want me to come, I don’t want to come either. At a social sciences academic panel, the head of the Social Sciences department point blank admitted to me the weaknesses in Rice’s econ department without me even dropping Harvard or Chicago. The highlight of my trip was watching 300 at the Angelicka and hanging out with some fairly cool people. Read the Rice Thresher, which had editorials defending Playboy and lamenting the lack of film culture in Houston.

What I got out of this trip was that Harvard truly does offer me more in everything I wanted. The prestige is just a nice bonus. The people who I liked the most at Rice were all not attending Rice because they had glitzier acceptances to MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Harvard to their name. I'm not sure that this says about me; am I already catching the elitist Harvard bug? I really did feel a marked difference on the caliber of students between Rice and Harvard. I want to be humbled, inspired, and challenged by my students. I know that will happen at Harvard.

Prefrosh Weekend and Hawaii entries to come later.

re: The title. At Harvard, there were a bunch of t-shirts saying Yale is What's for Dinner.