Dates of Owl Days, Admit Days ill-chosen

By Staff Editorial     1/28/10 6:00pm

Many students' first experiences at Rice consist of overnight visits as prospective students. The tradition lives on, even if over the past few years the names, dates and frequency of Rice's annual official prospective student visits have changed - from Owl Weekend to Owl Days to now Owl Days and Admit Days - to accommodate the growing class sizes (see story, page 1). Despite these changes, the idea has remained basically the same: Allow prospective students, who have already been admitted to Rice and are whittling down their final college choices before the May commit deadline, to stay on campus with a student host, sit in on classes of their choice and experience Rice culture as a whole. Unfortunately, the proposed dates for this year's Owl Days and Admit Days, sandwiching the last week of classes, threaten to undermine more than one Rice tradition. Admit Days' occurrence on the last day of classes, which is coincidentally College Night for both Hanszen College and Wiess College, guarantees that parents and prospective students alike will be eyewitnesses to some of the most widespread drunken antics on Rice's campus this side of Beer Bike. While the administration would like to flaunt Rice's social sphere along with its academics, this is not the angle to take - and one that seems almost antithetical to the administration's attempts to sweep all things Beer Bike-related (i.e., intoxicated and crazed) under the rug. The large majority of parents and prospective students will undoubtedly be perturbed by costumes and drinking games in the backs of classes; in turn, the Rice University Police Department will be keen on cracking down on underage drinking, which we fear will temper the merriment of certain revelers. Additionally, students interested in sitting in on a class or two will be shortchanged: Most classes on the last day will consist of exams, and those that don't will be dominated by drunken antics. And we're not even going to touch on the awkwardness of prospective students coming during the first day of dead period, when no classes are even in session.

On the other end of the spectrum, Owl Days will be taking place on the Thursday and Friday before the last week of classes, when most of us will be too swamped with end-of-semester work to even consider hosting a prospective student. This is not the first year that prospective student visits have inconveniently coincided with the impossible workload that we all face as spring turns to summer, a fact that has led to less-than-stellar Owl Day experiences for prospective students who either are abandoned by their hosts and dumped on various roommates and friends, or are unable to visit at all due to a shortage of available student hosts and an accompanying boost in admitted students.

Those involved in the planning of Owl Days and Admit Days should garner student body input before scheduling these visits, in order to avoid such conflicts as College Night and the work-filled end of the semester. Why not push these visits just two weeks earlier - such as April 8-9 and 15-16? Not only will current students be freer and less intoxicated and the environment more representative of Rice life, but prospective students will also have an earlier chance to visit and make a college decision before the crunch of AP exams hits.

---

---

Of course, it is entirely possible that the university has transitioned its focus onto solely recruiting students who enjoy swigging the flask in the back of the classroom - which is another discussion entirely.

---