IS RICE WORTH IT? 
Having stood up for Houston’s heat, humidity, flying cockroaches, mosquitoes, sprawl, flooding, “no mountains,” and other typically unheralded features of the local landscape (even as more official civic campaigns shied away from the task) the folks behind the cité vérité Houston. It’s Worth It. promotional campaign are ready to move onto their next crowdsourced publishing project. “Contrary to the way it might sound,” declares a splash page announcing the project, HIWI: Rice “is not a cookbook. Nor, for all you anxious undergrads, is it a text book.” Instead, the publishers at communications firm ttweak are hoping to produce a collection of comments, stories, and photos that’ll end up serving as “part love letter, part roast, part remembrance” of Rice University, on the occasion of the institution’s 100th birthday. Working from the same model that produced the original Houston. It’s Worth It. book and HIWI: Ike, the publishers are soliciting contributions from anyone who has anything to say about the campus, its people, and its place in the city: “Have you ever shot bottle rockets in the parking lot? Were you there for Kennedy’s speech? Ever knocked back a few at Valhalla? . . . Even if you’ve never set foot inside a Rice classroom, we want to know what the ‘Institute’ means to you.” [HIWI; previously on Swamplot] Photo: ttweak
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One of the ttweak boys is an old buddy of mine from Rice. Should be a cool thing with lots of the unexpected.
What Rice means to me: hedge-lined, grade-inflated, debauchery on a free ride.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish I’d gone there! However, my parents weren’t wealthy enough or poor enough, they weren’t brown, black, or yellow enough, they didn’t live far enough away, and I was born with a penis. It wasn’t in the cards. (That I was also an abysmal high school student shouldn’t matter, am I right people?)
Anime club Saturdays hosted at the Media Center – thanks again, Liz!
LOL at The Niche for playing the straight white male victim card while ignoring the fact that Rice was a white males club for a majority of those 100 years.
Hey, that’s another thing that Rice is known for: having produced privileged white male graduates that are now in a position to employ me, but that have no concept of how much more difficult it is to be a white male from a middle class background, these days. Times are different. The older generation can’t relate to my struggle.
(This is all tongue-in-cheek, obviously.)
Yeh it’s the worst being a white, middle-class male…. I’d happily trade places with a poor black woman any day. They get all the breaks in life!
doofus: Women were admitted from the very beginning. The very first class of students in 1912 had 48 men and 29 women. Alas, women weren’t given on-campus housing until 1957, and the first African-American wasn’t admitted until 1963.
Brilliant!
Later editions–
HIWI:Potholes
HIWI:3rd World Urbanity
HIWI:Traffic
“Worth It” is relative. 30 years post-graduation everybody feels their special university experience was worth it. One year out of college – while earning just over minimum-wage – not so much.
Oh the stories I could tell about the Weissmen, circa late 1980s…
I have no idea how they fit academics in at all. High intelligence, I suppose.
Have sat, sleepless, on a bench near Sammy’s and watched live oak trees vibrate…at dawn.
The colors were…so…vivid…
These Weissmen always had, uh, dalliances, you see.
Rice changed my life. I truly blossomed there. Academically, mostly Bs, but I was involved in about 7 extra-curriculars. VP at Baker and such. I am most definitely writing in…only, what’s “appropriate”? I’ll have to think hard for some reflections that don’t involve any beer or sex. Rice is a party school for the 200 that choose to party.