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"What does your daughter think of Rice?"

She likes it.

Of course it is much more difficult than the community college she attended for three years, where she had a 4.0 without having to work very hard. At Rice, at least in her chemical engineering classes, she has to work very hard just to get above the mean on tests. I think that having to work hard and finding out that no matter how smart you are, there is always someone who is smarter is good for her.

She has done better in her electives, getting an A+ on her final paper in her English British Writers: Chaucer to 1800 Class. She loved her professor and is planing on taking a Shakespeare class from the same professor, if she can get into the class.

My daughter had a full scholarship to the University of Houston, and was all set to go there, but a visit to each campus changed her mother's mind in a hurry.

The Rice campus is really very beautiful. All the buildings are in a similar style, sort of Mediterranean, but different, and all the architects have used their considerable creativity in designing variations on a theme, so that each building is unique, even though they are all harmonious. Many of the buildings were designed by graduates of the Rice School of Architecture, which is very good by the way, but some of the newer buildings were done by noted outside architects.

The campus is not too far from downtown Houston, in an area that has very nice homes and trendy shops. Across the street from the campus is a large park and the Houston Medical Center, which consists of quite a few hospitals and a couple medical schools. There is great big fence around the entire campus, with gates that can be and sometimes are closed. Just outside the fence there are trees and shrubs, thus everything outside the campus is considered to be "outside the hedges" or the real world. Just outside the hedges, they have a jogging path where joggers can be seen circling the campus.

They have a residential system, which is sort of like co-ed fraternities. Everyone is randomly assigned to a particular "college", which is what they call the various buildings where the students live and eat. My daughter commutes, but she has still been assigned a college, in her case, Baker College, named after an ancestor of former Secretary of State James Baker, the guy who helped keep Gore form stealing the 2000 election. James Baker still has something to do with an Institute for Public Policy at the school. The intramural sports and various sophomoric rivalries take place between and among the various colleges.

The students at Rice are not generally conservative, but they are not generally activists, either. There were no protests or sit-ins at Rice during the run up to the start of the war in Iraq or during the presidential elections, as far as I remember. My daughter said that a few students said that they were bummed out when Bush won, but it was not a big deal. A couple of Nobel prize wining professors at Rice sent out an e-mail criticizing the Bush science policy and invited Rice students to a meeting to discuss their opinions, but that just shows that even very smart people can be blind when it comes to politics.

My daughter does say that almost everyone has something unique and interesting about him or her and that almost everyone is nice and friendly. My daughter is conservative and she dresses modestly in long skirts, but she does not feel like she is ostracized for not being one of the hip college crowd. There is supposed to be a good deal of drinking going on at the parties thrown at the residence colleges, but my daughter does not drink, so she has no first hand knowledge about that. She did mention that one of the guys in her class in chemical engineering got so drunk last semester that he had to go to the hospital, but I suppose that happens at most colleges these days. At least most of the drinking happens in the rooms on campus, so the kids are not driving while drunk.

My daughter has found the professors to be funny and nice, although she thinks they must be evil to assign such difficult homework and give such hard tests. They have an honor code at Rice, so she often takes her tests at home and has to quit when her time is up, even when she is not done. I know my daughter obeys the honor code to the letter of the law, but I wonder if all the kids who she is graded against on the curve are as scrupulous as she is in following the code.

Rice expensive, but for a very good private school, its tuition is comparatively low, and even though our income is not low, my daughter still gets quite a bit of financial help in the form of grants and subsidized loans, and she also takes out some unsubsidized loans and works in the summer, so our out of pocket expenses are not too bad. My daughter was doing work study, but her classes are hard enough without her having to work during the semester, so she cut that out this year.

Overall, we are happy with Rice, but my daughter is probably not getting the full benefit of a Rice education by getting a degree in chemical engineering and by commuting. My daughter complains that in the chemical engineering classes, the professors do not do a real good job of explaining the material. Instead they expect the students to figure it out on their own. And, since doing the work required for chemical engineering takes so much time, my daughter has not had the time to take advantage of many of the neat things that she sees are going on around campus. Ditto the commuting, which keeps her out of some of the more fun, but less academic goings on on the campus.

Your daughter sounds like she would be a good candidate for Rice. Even with her excellent verbal SAT score, she would still be challenged by the material in humanity classes, since 25% of the students have verbal SATs above 760. Rice does not have a major/minor system, so many of the students are double majors and often the two majors are in wildly different areas. My daughter says that many of her classmates are also student athletes and she wonders how they can manage to play sports and still be so competitive academically. My daughter is not athletic, but she is quiet and shy, but she still has lots of friends. My daughter does get a kick out of the antics of some of the more outgoing and enthusiastic kids in class, laughing at some of the funny quips they come up with in class and enjoying the way the professors seem to be able to handle the wise guys and girls with good grace.

Since Rice likes to have lots of different types of students on campus, you might want to highlight that which is unique about your daughter. In our case, my daughter stressed the fact that she was homeschooled, conservative, and a religious Christian and she was admitted, so it must have worked.