Senior Spotlight: Jason Mendez
(09/25/19 2:32am)
Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in Senior Spotlights, a series intended to explore the stories of graduating seniors, who are chosen at random to participate.
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Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in Senior Spotlights, a series intended to explore the stories of graduating seniors, who are chosen at random to participate.
Until Senior Night for his high school’s varsity soccer team, Drew Carter didn’t know whether he was going to college.
For the last 10 years, Rice University has had 11 residential colleges. Enter McPlunkett College, Rice’s imaginary 12th college, founded in 2019 by the matriculating class. What started as an inside joke blew up to massive proportions, receiving shoutouts from Rice Housing and Dining, the Marching Owl Band and an official Rice University Instagram story. But the otherwise wholesome idea that brought new students together actually came to one of them in the form of a nightmare.
Few artists can master a genre transition. Lady Gaga dabbled in jazz with her Tony Bennett collaboration “Cheek to Cheek” and before she was famous and Katy Perry sang in a Christian rock band. But Taylor Swift’s transition from country to pop is arguably the most successful genre switch of all time. With her seventh studio album “Lover,” her first album released since leaving Scooter Braun’s label, Swift yet again proves her ability to blend current musical style with her enduring tongue-in-cheek personality.
Assigned roommates. It’s a struggle that almost all new students at Rice have to deal with. But sometimes these pairings work out surprisingly well, leading to great friendships and pairs who live together all four years.
From classes on media and esports to biological information about skin, fall 2019 college courses cater to a variety of student interests.
Although the residential college system is one of the most prominent aspects of life at Rice, the process of sorting students into colleges remains shrouded in mystery. Is it a computer program? A sorting hat? Fate?
Hanszen College’s new magisters, Fabiola Lopez-Duran and Carlos Martinez-Rivera, are an adventurous couple. From their love of travel and the fact that they have lived in three different continents, it’s clear that they enjoy excitement in life. But many Rice students might not know their most adventurous choice — getting engaged only one week after they met.
Dressing up in costume, finding a stranger in the crowded Grand Hall, going on a blind date — only Rice would combine these three things into one event, Rice Program Council’s Screw Yer Roommate. And probably only Rice students would go to an event like Screw, which gives students the rare opportunity to go on a date without actually having to ask someone out. Screw is reminiscent of a rom-com meet-cute, and for a few students, that rom-com becomes their real life.
Michel and Melanie Achard have an easy, natural rapport. From the way they finish each other’s sentences to the way Michel teases Melanie about “selling out” by leaving teaching to work a corporate job, it’s easy to understand why Sid Richardson College claimed the couple as their new magisters.
When Lan Margosis picks up the phone for our FaceTime interview, the sound of steaming floods the background. This can only mean one thing — Margosis is cooking. The steam, they tell me, comes from a vegan flan recipe they’re workshopping for their monthly pop-up dinner, the Magnolia City Speakeasy, where they invite guests into their home and cook a three-course, plant-based meal for them.
Rating: 4/5
On Wednesday nights, Rice Coffeehouse fills up wall to wall with students waiting to hear their friends, roommates or favorite a cappella groups perform. On the walls themselves hang pieces of art created by Rice students. These performances are part of an event called Espresso Yourself. In 2017, current Martel College senior Clair Hopper added a visual art component to the event and began accepting student submissions for the art that hangs on the Coffeehouse walls.
It’s hard to miss the bright red, orange and yellow seats that fill McMurtry’s commons. And McMurtry College freshman Dani Ennis hates them. If she had designed her college’s central space, she would have done it differently. While she likes the open space and the natural light, she’d prefer if the chairs were purple — still eye-catching, but they’d show off McMurtry’s color.
Even though it’s only been five weeks, freshman violist Lauren Ross has made herself at home at Shepherd — she’s already taken many naps on the black couches in the lobby, which she claims is the best napping spot in all of Rice. It’s easy to see that she’s comfortable at Shepherd by the way she stakes out practice rooms, which have windows that overlook the Skyspace on one side. As she pushes through the glass doors that look more like windows to enter Shepherd’s courtyard, she looks so at home that it’s hard to imagine her anywhere else. But one year ago, Ross wasn’t even sure she would pursue music at all.