Advice for a Freshman Starting at Rice University?

As I’ve mentioned in passing a couple of times, my daughter will be starting up at Rice University this year.  People have emailed helpful bits of advice, and mentioned that they have kids at Rice, so I thought, it being a Sunday morning, I’d just ask straight out what advice you might have for a soon to be Rice freshman.

Background:  My daughter is not a science-engineering-math type, and will almost certainly gravitate to the humanities – history, English, I’m not sure.  She was very keen on Rice from the beginning; school in Texas appealed to her even though she has no family or other connection there, and she was excited about the “house” system.  My wife and I know very little about Rice – in my case because it doesn’t have a law school, so it’s not so much on my radar screen.  To the extent I thought about it, I think of Rice as a being strong mostly in areas that are not my daughter’s strengths.  So, to be honest, I was concerned that she had decided to pass up Chicago to take Rice; the leading choices for her came down to UCLA, Berkeley, Chicago, and Rice.  She chose Rice, and I’m struggling to play catch-up about an institution that’s not really part of my law professor orbit.

I don’t know what house she will wind up in – I take she hasn’t been assigned one yet.  My guess is that she will do some humanities major and eventually apply to law school, perhaps business school.  I’ve urged her to try and find ways to take advantage of being at a strong science-engineering university, even as a humanities major; the problem is how to do that without messing up one’s GPA, because competing in those classes won’t work.  She’s facing the classic problem of maximizing the education in tradeoff with maximizing the credential; it’s easy to say, do both, but for most of us there are significant tradeoffs.  I’ve suggested to her that she should look closely at pass-fail possibilities to take classes which are really important in the long run – going to next step in calculus and statistics, for example, and maybe an accounting class – but in which she might worry about her grades.  I’ve encouraged her to think about interdisciplinary projects with engineering students on interactions of technology with society and culture – she is darned tired hearing from me about robots and society, but that sort of thing in various areas of technology.

So I’d be grateful for advice you could pass along, particularly those who are reasonably familiar with Rice as relatively recent grads or parents of grads, on what advice you’d have to a humanities major probably aiming at law school down the road, or perhaps business school.  My daughter reads occasionally this blog – but only posts by the Chief Conspirator – but she and my wife will be looking at this thread closely.  Thanks!

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