10 worst things at Rice

By Seth Brown & Ryan Gupta     8/22/12 7:00pm

 

In honor of Sammy Adams' rousing performance in front of tens of students at Rice University and his hit song "I Hate College," we present to you the 10 worst things about Rice. O-Week is rosy, everything is perfect, and if you believe what your advisors tell you, the only bad thing about Rice is Martel College. But ladies and gentleman, that is certainly not the case. Without further ado ... 

10. Concerts 

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In recent years, Rice students have been delighted to see groundbreaking top musicians such as DJ Earworm and Mister Heavenly. At the same time, peer schools such as Duke University have booked names like B.o.B, Kanye West, Jay Sean and Ludacris. From the attendance at recent Rice concerts, one would think the musicians were doing a sound test, not actually performing. Quite frankly, there is no reason we should not be able to attract an artist big enough that students come out and pack Tudor. 

9. Wiess College 

While we undeniably join the majority of the student body in hating on Martel Dormitory and Will Rice College, the only college that really gets us mad is Wiess College. For the most part, we do not have a problem with Wiess, but there is one tradition there that disturbs us particularly: While some colleges are left scrambling for funds in the last few months of the academic year, every year Wiess bestows a freshman with a full-tuition scholarship for the next year. While we have no objections in principle to alumni donating to their former colleges, an imbalance of these proportions is more obscene than the ubangee. 

8. No athletic school spirit 

This university's lack of athletic school spirit is depriving students here of a seminal aspect of the college experience. The traditional markings of game days on other campuses - from tailgating to face painting - are replaced at Rice by inconspicuous lawn signs and passing students who can be heard saying, "No, I don't think there's a game this week." Despite some efforts to increase attendance, poor performance in mainstream sports and low publicity of other sporting events have given an apathetic student body just enough reason to remain apathetic about Rice Athletics. 

7. Classes with pre-meds 

If you have taken any course that is required by medical schools, you have likely already experienced the debacle that is taking a course that is full of pre-meds. It is difficult to blame the pre-meds - for most of them, an undergraduate degree is just a means to an end, and the vast majority of the material they learn will be totally irrelevant to them once they move on to medical school. However, for students who are legitimately interested in learning the material presented in these courses, that is exactly the issue: They end up stuck in a course full of students who are primarily interested in their final grades - and the professors know it. 

6. Overcrowding 

Our freshman year, McMurtry and Duncan Colleges opened. As the undergraduate population has steadily grown since then, the symptoms of overcrowding have become apparent. since the only new classrooms are in Brockman Hall and the new and renovated colleges. Though the Office of the Registrar has clearly done some creative arranging to find spaces for every class, it is clear that Rice will need more classrooms and professors in the long term. 

5. Missing majors (journalism, finance, neuroscience) 

While Rice offers a plethora of majors, including the ever-popular ancient Mediterranean civilizations major, it still lacks some common tracks of study. Owls headed to Wall Street are forced into an economics major because of our lack of a finance major, and students interested in the booming journalism sector have the opportunity for nearly no academic exposure in the field beyond the extremely prestigious weekly student newspaper. Neuroscience is another popular major missing from Rice's curriculum. As a research university focused on the natural sciences, this is arguably the most glaring omission. 

4. Parking fines and appeals process 

Rice may only be 17th in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, but our rank is unparalleled in "universities with unreasonably ruthless parking enforcement." Armed with orange envelopes and golf carts, these officers will immediately locate your wrongly parked car and redecorate your dashboard with a splash of orange. Judging by the speed and efficiency of parking ticket distribution, it seems entirely plausible that the parking enforcement officers work on commission. If you are in a particularly giving mood, you also have the opportunity to pay $10 to lose an appeal on your ticket. This, of course, is all in addition to the $210 undergraduate surcharge for campus parking. 

3. The meal plan and the serveries 

While the food in the serveries is, for the most part, good, it is not what we would like to eat every day. However, since we live on campus, we have no choice but to pay for 19 meals a week - whether we eat them or not. The paternalistic attitude taken by Housing and Dining with regard to breakfast is simply patronizing: Students who habitually do not eat breakfast should not have to pay for it - even if they should be eating it. The institution last semester of a more formalized food rep program will hopefully improve the situation with regard to the variety of the food, but Housing and Dining should not need food reps to tell them, for instance, that it is a waste of money to fill the fruit salad with chunks of cantaloupe and honeydew that no one will eat. 

2. Harvard University comparisons 

We are not the Harvard of the South. We are neither pretentious nor trust-fund recipients. We are neither cutthroat competitive nor perpetually pedantic. Harvard, whether the stereotypes are to be believed or not, is not in any way similar to Rice. Rice is Beer Bike and residential colleges and not walking through the Sallyport because maybe, just maybe, the legend is true. We get a world-class education, and we have a damn good time doing it. We have a culture that is unduplicable, and any comparisons to other schools fall apart quickly. 

1. Apathetic students 

The concerns we have described here are by no means uncommon to Rice students - but most students do little more than complain to their friends before accepting the situation as set in stone. While it may be easiest to just blame the administration, it is up to the students to take the initiative and put change in motion. At the end of the day, the administration exists to serve the university's faculty and students, and if a concerted effort on the part of students to prompt change to some aspect of student life does fall on deaf ears, our response should be to get louder, not to give up. 

Seth Brown is a senior at Jones College and Thresher Editor in Chief. 

Ryan Gupta is a senior at Baker 

College and Thresher Editor in Chief. 

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