3 * o-week at my college

The College System: 300 of Your Closest Friends

You've heard about them, you've read about them, maybe they were even part of the reason you decided to come here. But in case you weren't paying attention, here's the rundown on the colleges ... one more time.

In early July, the entire incoming freshman class was thrown in a very large bowl. (Well, your names were, anyway.) A group of important people -- probably including the O-Week steering committee and Zen Camacho (the V.P. for Student Affairs and a really swell guy) -- sat around and drew all the names out and randomly placed each of you in one of eight residential colleges.

You are a member of a college for your entire stay at Rice. (Remember, you were placed there randomly, so no college is better than any other. Though each thinks it's the best, and will tell you so at the slightest provocation.) There are no fraternities or sororities; no gigantic school-wide food-factory cafeterias; no rows of countless identical dorm buildings. Colleges take the place of all of that.

Your college is your dorm -- each college has one or two buildings devoted to housing its members. Your college is your cafeteria -- each college has a section (the "commons") where you can eat, as well as schmooze and pick up your postal mail.

Moreover, your college is your new extended family. Instead of being lumped in with six or seven hundred freshmen, you're now lumped in with 300+ Rice students of all classes and all academic majors. You live next to these people; you eat with these people; these people are 300 of your closest friends.

Your college has already elected two or three of its bright, upstanding members to plan your college's O-Week activities. These are your coordinators.

The O-Week Power Structure

Those coordinators, supreme exalted gurus of Rice that they are, have scoured the campus for advisors to help them during O-Week. They then sit down with the list of freshmen assigned to the college and divide them randomly (we like randomess here) into O-Week groups.

They assigned to each group several of their advisors; usually about half of your advisors are from your college (and half have been mercifully allowed to hang out at your college for a week to help you too.)

Your advisors have already been sent some of your declassified personal info. (This is how they know things like your name, your face, and your fantasy celebrity crush you put down on your information sheet because you thought nobody would notice.)

From the Thursday before you arrive until that single scary moment when it looks like they're ripping off your luggage in the college parking lot, they've been preparing for O-Week. Basically, O-Week is generally such a blast that people get excited just to be an advisor for another freshman class. (Hey, there's stiff competition just to be an advisor -- interviews, background checks, embarrasing tasks to perform, that sort of thing.)

(Besides, as long as your new advisors are taking your stuff out of your car, they might as well lug it up to your new room.)

Basically, adjusting to school is hard. To sum up O-Week, (again from the Will Rice College o-week book): "Our job ... is to help you make that happen by giving you a good start. No pressure."

Okay, what about MY college?

Since you've probably already been told which college you're in, we thought you might ask that question. Here's a small morsel of info on each college's top-secret O-Week plans: (click on your college, silly!)

Baker - Brown - Hanszen - Jones
Lovett - Wiess - Will Rice - Sid Richardson

A small list of things you might not have thought you'd do your first week at college

("Higher education" just means we have a heightened sense of fun.)

• piling into small cars to ransack strange business establishments at 3 in the morning (The House of Pies, Taco Cabana)
• start calling the local Target store "tar-zhay" (to make it sound exotic)
• scouring the campus for a scavenger hunt -- carrying off signs, foodstuffs, photos, and people
• making daily pilgrimages to the local Stop & Go convenience-mart for a 64-oz. "Hoss" brimming with unnaturally-colored caffeinated tasty beverage
• most likely, becoming fairly wet fairly often
• ...

Fact: COMPAQ was started by a bunch of guys drawing diagrams on the back of one of the placemats at the House of Pies.
Fact: Nothing ever got started at Taco Cabana. As far as we know.

There are also a few placement tests and maybe a speech or two (by popular professors, we promise) -- and of course, the official matriculation ceremony -- but all that in good time.

Moving right along...

If you're entering as a freshman (i.e. into the class of 2002), you may want to skip ahead to the section on preparing for Rice, because the next section is for those special few who've been brave enough to transfer to Rice from another university.

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