This trip is a nice excuse to keep our kid on track in her college preps and to give her another chance to ask questions. From what I've heard of other families, nothing substitutes for a kid looking around a campus and thinking "Yeah, I definitely fit in here." Personally, within the first 10 minutes of visiting Notre Dame, I knew that I'd made a horrible mistake going to USNA.
Our kid came up with the criteria on her own, and she's done her own work. We'd happily drop her off at Rice and let her do her own tour but we stay in the back of the room and try to keep our mouths shut. About the only thing we've done is whisper questions in her ear and call bull on a couple comments of an overenthusiastic ROTC officer.
So if she joins the family business, great for her. If she wants to enjoy a couple years' free ROTC tuition and then bail for a real career, that's fine-- at least she'll understand the military a little better. And if she goes all the way to a military career and an early retirement... well, she certainly knows how to do that too.
Let me know if you decide to visit. I'll make sure you get outfitted with the right kind of snake boots and scorpion sting kits!
And I assume your daughter will be asserting her independence and taking the Marine Corps option. Would you like me to send you some "My Daughter is a Marine" stickers for your cars?
We'll sort out our itinerary and I'll send out some PMs. Maybe we should have a Houston E-R.org chapter meeting!
Hey, when I started at USNA I wanted to be a Marine pilot. (Then I had a summer submarine cruise.) The Marine recruiting commercials still give me chicken skin. I'm sure our kid, let alone my spouse, would have a lot of fun comparing the Marines to submariners. I've kidded her about it but her cousin the Army Ranger has pretty much talked her out of mud-crawling, and the Marines would have to develop a civil engineering corps to be of interest to her. FWIW she thinks that infantry is "better" (I think her words were "less crazy") than aviation.
If you search this forum, you will see that Rice was recommended to you before you went on your college tour (
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/showpost.php?p=528839&postcount=40)
You're absolutely right. I didn't let her forget about it, either.
Teenagers can be cruel, thoughtless, and inconsiderate. When I passed your recommendation on, her reaction was "Yeah, but they don't really have winter." You'll be happy to know that since her hasty riposte the student comments at Notre Dame, Carnegie-Mellon, and particularly RPI have scared the heck out of her. (Notre Dame: 15-20 degrees below zero some winters. CMU: Photos of buildings awash in snowdrifts. When the heat goes out at RPI, it's considered an emergency.) Being a nuke, of course, I made her keep Rice on her list until she completed a full review & assessment and we had established a plan. After her tour of the "frozen wasteland belt", it's lookin' a lot better. Believe me, her parents are much more likely to visit her there.
Is you daughter cute? If so she may not get into Rice. I remember my brother's comments, Rice Class 65. '98% of the women in Houston are cute, the other 2% go to Rice!"
Despite the fact that my daughter looks an awful lot like me, I'll let Diana Lopez answer your question...
My only comments on Rice are to support the comment on the bias to non-Texas admissions and to warn you/her that Rice is brutally competitive. Most of the school is technology oriented and incoming freshman have very high SAT scores. I believe they have a pretty high freshman dropout rate.
I don't think you've posted her SAT score but check the Rice stats on their webpage. My recollection from my son's days is that the lower decile is above 1300 and that is probably for the football players. SAT scores aren't a perfect predictor of college performance but it's a good indication of the competition coming in.
"Brutally competitive" describes most of the schools we've looked at. In fact she views USNA as her "safety school".
She took the SATs a couple months ago and nailed 'em hard enough to go anywhere except possibly Stanford, CIT, & MIT. She's been studying the subjects & strategies and she's taking them again in November. (Rice should provide a little motivational boost to that schedule!) She has the high-school transcript, AP classes, college credits, and the Kumon record to back up those scores-- and the taekwondo/basketball/community stuff to round everything out. About the only reason she's really taking the SATs again (as a junior) is to [-]beat my 30-year-old scores[/-] assuage any college's concerns that she just got lucky as a sophomore.
A shipmate of ours, the head of USNA's Admissions committee, looked at her record and opined that our kid was a better candidate than both of her parents put together. (She'll probably rack up a better conduct record, too.) So no worries. But if our kid gets her boat blown out of the water, I think a little healthy competition helps keep the ego humble. (It certainly worked on me.) The earlier that happens the better.
1. Extraordinarily small, with only about 3000 undergraduates. (It's either the smallest or second-smallest school playing Division One athletics.)
2. A residential college system similar to Yale's. Each incoming freshman is randomly assigned to one of the colleges, which have their own dorm, student government, etc.
3. No "greek" sororities or fraternities.
4. An honor system similar to the one at the U.S. service academies. With punishments given out by a panel of fellow students.
5. Athletes, which make up a relatively high percentage of students, are mainstreamed into the student population. No jock dorms or special majors.
Yep, we checked all of that out too. I was surprised at the size of the student body yet they still pulled down an NROTC staff-- that's no easy accomplishment. Right, Stanford?
It'd be great if USNA adopted #5 as well... just kidding. Well, a little.
I was surprised to see a number of PMs when I checked my e-mail this morning, and I'll answer you all. Gotta go-- I'm on a break at a referee clinic during our dojang's taekwondo tournament. I'll post more in the next couple days.
