Quality of Rice's Academic Life Essay

Even in my current extracurricular activities, such as on my Varsity football team, sacrificing my need to be a 'star' and instead serve the common good is a necessity. Teaching the novice debaters is an integral part of my duties on my school's Lincoln-Douglas Debate team. I must help them see the world from competing perspectives, and to see issues in terms of grey, rather than stark black and white.

I am so thankful for the people in my life who have taught me this spirit of community: the people I met over the summer in Texas taught me what it means to be a good neighbor, the children and senior citizens I have befriended who have shown me that friendship knows no age or socioeconomic status. I have, despite the shortness of my life, tried to craft an open soul with few fences, with no barbed wire around my heart. The poet Robert Frost mocked the cliche "good fences make good neighbors." I disagree with such a sentiment as well -- to be a good neighbor is to extend a helping hand, to rebuild a home, to open a mind with knowledge -- not put up a fence. I hope to bring that same spirit to the Residential College System of Rice University and uphold not only the traditions of scholarship I learned at my high school, but also the lessons of service I have learned from my many experiences.Question 2: What motivated you to apply to Rice University?

'Teach a man to fish for a day, and he eats for a lifetime.'

Rice students, it is said, know how to learn, and know how to have fun -- because learning is synonymous with fun at Rice. Deeply committing to one's education is one of life's greatest joys. This is the atmosphere I seek at Rice: it is a university that will prepare me for the competitive marketplace and is rigorously academic, yet it will also offer me a kind of safe space to explore my academic passions. At Rice I may go fishing for knowledge, cast many lines. Eventually, with the support of my professors and fellow students I will graduate not just with knowledge, but with the security that I have learned how to learn. Rice offers an intensive commitment to undergraduate education combined with the resources of a research university. It stands on the cusp of a wider world and strives to engage in significant knowledge-gathering and analysis in a useful fashion. But Rice also sees that much can be gained learning from a perspective that is not purely pragmatic. Its course offerings span entrepreneurial leadership and the rhetoric of leadership; business communications and the culture….....