Why aren't more retiring in Houston?

[Orchidflower]

Nords, Rice is on the top 10 or so of best schools in the nation as I am sure you already know. Even their diplomas are made of real sheepskin like of old. Your son would love it there, surely. Go for it! Houston is a mecca for the 18-32 y.o. crowd as it has so many clubs and sports activities there for that age group.
Houston must be about so humid as Florida, maybe a little hotter due to the lack of breeze from the Gulf, but the city's Medical Center is so outstanding that I asked this question as I just don't get why more seniors aren't retiring there. Seems kinda logical to me that they would be interested in Houston as the cost of living is also below average despite the high--but frozen after 65--property tax rates, etc. etc. etc.
Then again...I had an attorney friend who lived in the Medical Center, was born with a weak heart and died with the phone in his hand when he had the fatal heart attack. We can only guess he was calling 911. You can't win them all I guess, but he tried (poor fellow).

[Marquette]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Orchidflower Nords, Rice is on the top 10 or so of best schools in the nation as I am sure you already know. Even their diplomas are made of real sheepskin like of old. Your son would love it there, surely. Go for it!

Daughter!

Edit quick, edit quick!

[Rustic23]

just had a piece in the paper here, MBA grads from Rice are averaging $95,000 starting salaries!

[Leonidas]

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Originally Posted by Nords I was wrong. Apparently Rice U has a NROTC unit, both civil and environmental engineering programs, and a basketball team-- so our kid is interested. I hear there's a fairly good taekwondo school run by a family named Lopez, too...

Good school. I read recently that Rice is trying to improve its visibility nationally and out of state applicants are more desirable to some degree.

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Originally Posted by Nords Believe it or not there's a flight directly from Honolulu to Houston. We're looking at our high school's fall break the week of 6-10 Oct, hopefully when the humidity is down and the heat is tolerable.

It will be downright beautiful then. Avg temp will be mid 80's and humidity will be down to about 60%.

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?

[LOL!]

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Originally Posted by Nords Well, I passed by this thread and all its gory details because I was pretty sure that I was never goin' to Houston. I was wrong. Apparently Rice U has a NROTC unit, both civil and environmental engineering programs, and a basketball team-- so our kid is interested. I hear there's a fairly good taekwondo school run by a family named Lopez, too...

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/foru...9&postcount=40)

And contrary to other posts on this thread, you will not need boots nor sting kits.

[Rustic23]

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!"

[REWahoo]

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Originally Posted by Rustic23 Is you daughter cute?

Careful Rustic. Nords could be an NBC employee working on their "To Catch a Predator" show.

[2B]

Nords,

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.

It's also a beautiful campus near the med center and is a bargain compared to other ivy league schools. It's also a favorite hangout for perverts but I think that applies to most college campuses.

[Htown Harry]

A few other features of Rice:

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.

[Leonidas]

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Originally Posted by Htown Harry 1. Extraordinarily small, with only about 3000 undergraduates. (It's either the smallest or second-smallest school playing Division One athletics.)

Probably the second smallest. The University of Tulsa has a slightly smaller undergraduate body. They host Rice for the homecoming game this year on October 4th.

Tulsa stole Rice's coach (Todd Graham) two years ago, and the MOB (Rice Band) did a halftime show titled "Where the Hell is Todd Graham?" when TU played there last year.
http://mob.rice.edu/history/scripts/...24_Tulsa.shtml

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TULSA, Okla. -- Tulsa has filed a formal complaint with Conference USA over the Rice marching band's performance of "Todd Graham's Inferno" during halftime of Saturday's football game in Houston. Graham left Rice for Tulsa after just one season. His Golden Hurricane defeated Rice 48-43 to win the C-USA West Division title. Tulsa plays Central Florida for the conference championship Saturday. The band's show depicted a search for the former Owls coach through different circles of Hell -- based on Dante's "Divine Comedy." The Tulsa World reported Tuesday that the show ended by calling Graham an offensive name over the public address system.

The MOB's shows can sometimes be hilarious, but they are never your standard halftime act.

[HFWR]

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Originally Posted by Leonidas ...Texas Instruments...

I believe they've renamed the company "Taiwan Instruments"...

[Leonidas]

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Originally Posted by HFWR I believe they've renamed the company "Taiwan Instruments"...

Sorry, I don't get it.:confused:

I know they do a lot of business with asian companies, but I thought they were still a US company headquartered in Dallas.

[HFWR]

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Originally Posted by Leonidas Sorry, I don't get it.:confused: I know they do a lot of business with asian companies, but I thought they were still a US company headquartered in Dallas.

Sorry, inside, er, uh, outside joke...

[Nords]

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leonidas 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.

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Originally Posted by LOL! 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/foru...9&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.

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Originally Posted by Rustic23 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...

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Originally Posted by 2B 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.

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Originally Posted by Htown Harry 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.

[2soon2tell]

I second the idea of a Houston E-R org meeting in Oct. The fall is the best time of year IMHO. You can sometimes even open your windows but you must be alert to climbing burgulars and assorted wildlife.

2soon2tell

[2B]

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Originally Posted by 2soon2tell I second the idea of a Houston E-R org meeting in Oct. The fall is the best time of year IMHO. You can sometimes even open your windows but you must be alert to climbing burgulars and assorted wildlife. 2soon2tell

That would be great. Do you want to start a separate thread so people know about it and coordinate it?

[OAG]

Understand there is a very large contingent of visitors on the way to Houston even as we speak. Maybe some of them would be interested in a ER meeting over the next few days, weeks, months!

[Alan]

We lived in The Woodlands for over 3 years and plan on initially RE'ing there. DS lives there. It has everything we need and we rarely ever went near Houston, but it is only 25 miles from the airport so great for international and domestic travel. It has a population about 90,000, is a planned community comprised of "villages" each with shopping areas, restauraunts and cafes. 150 miles of hike and bike trails, pedestrian cycles on the lights, dozens of public parks, tennis courts etc.

[Notmuchlonger]

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Originally Posted by Alan We lived in The Woodlands for over 3 years and plan on initially RE'ing there. DS lives there. It has everything we need and we rarely ever went near Houston, but it is only 25 miles from the airport so great for international and domestic travel. It has a population about 90,000, is a planned community comprised of "villages" each with shopping areas, restauraunts and cafes. 150 miles of hike and bike trails, pedestrian cycles on the lights, dozens of public parks, tennis courts etc.

We visited some folks in the Woodlands. Really nice area. Lots of shopping and we loved the way it was laid out. Housing prices were incredible on the affordability scale.

[Texas Proud]

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Originally Posted by 2B Nords, 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. It's also a beautiful campus near the med center and is a bargain compared to other ivy league schools. It's also a favorite hangout for perverts but I think that applies to most college campuses.

I have a niece that made 1590 on SAT (twice)... and did not get into the Rice architecture program... it is VERY competitive.... but I do not think she was really that interested...

I remember reading somewhere that they reject a very high percent of people who are perfect on the SAT....

It is also a quirky place.... so read up to see if she would like this or not... it is also expensive... but they do have a rich endowment fund, so if you need help they can do it...