Rice University

Date: Apr 12 2005
Major: Math (This Major's Salary over time)
I have had three hiccups that make me wish I had the opportunity to attend another undergraduate instituion.

First, I was sorely dissappointed with the quality of the Applied Mathematics program, which is mostly geared for graduate students. Several of the professors in the departments seem to have one goal in mind: to make simple material as difficult as possible just to justify their research and funding. I have met only two professors that do not follow this paradigm.

Second, my experiences in some classes out of my major (such as social sciences and humanties) were poor. Most classes emphasize brute-force memorization (that might be your thing). Also, the university forces students to take a certain number of humanties and social science classes. It seems like you have very many options, given the variety of courses in the student hand-book. However, they only allow you take one of three history classes (all American history, by the way) and only two art classes (both introductory drawing classes) for such credit. This is ridiculous, and yet all of my complaints have been ignored.

Third, I did not get as many graduate school offers as I expected from having attended a school such as Rice. I was one of the top of my class, had raving recomendation letters and yet only got into one or two graduate schools.

Aside from that, my experiences at Rice have been pleasant. I have excelled mathematically and feel confident that I will make some sort of contribution in graduate school. The PURE math faculty at Rice have been encouraging and down-right brilliant. Get me on another day, and I'll probably take back my response on whether I would want to go to another university because of how wonderful my experiences have been with the pure math department. Rice allows for many hours of student-teacher interaction and offers a pretty decent social life.