Special Projects

After 350 wins, Volpe still isn’t thinking about her legacy

During her 19-year tenure, Rice volleyball head coach Genny Volpe has led the Owls to seven NCAA tournaments, two conference championships, 14 winning seasons and, as of Aug. 26’s victory over the University of Houston, 350 wins. With the Owls back in the American Volleyball Coaches Association’s top 25 as of Monday, those numbers seem poised to keep improving. This is a flooring amount of success for a program that had never even been to the tournament until Volpe was hired, but she is far from willing to take sole credit. 

Volleyball upsets No. 17 Creighton, jumps into top-25

On Sunday, a flock of birds rose victorious above Tudor fieldhouse and it wasn’t a band of blue jays. After five intense sets, the Owls team took down No. 17 Creighton University on a second match point, capping off a tournament which started off with a reverse sweep of Big 12 opponent Kansas State University. After missing out on the American Volleyball Coaches Association’s Top 25 last week by one spot, the defining weekend was enough to jump the Rice volleyball team to No. 23 on the rankings. 

Owls put an end to longest winning streak in college football

The Rice football team broke the nation’s longest winning streak when they defeated the University of Louisiana at Lafayette 33-21 on Saturday night. The Ragin’ Cajuns had won 15 straight games, going back to last season, before their trip to Rice Stadium over the weekend. The victory against the Ragin’ Cajuns puts the Owls at 2-1 on the season as they head into their last week of non-conference play. Head coach Mike Bloomgren said that the upset win felt like a reward for the hard work that he and his team have put in.

​​Review: ‘The Hardest Part’ is the sound of love’s funeral

Like a prism turns light into color, Noah Cyrus turns pain into music. Emotion moves through Cyrus’s sound without resistance, leaving nothing lost in translation between her experience and her expression. While Cyrus cultivates a beautifully melancholic palette in “The Hardest Part,” I’m left equally impressed with her lyricism as I am with her musicality. “The Hardest Part” does more than provide listeners with ten pretty songs to cry to, it paints Cyrus’ world of doomed love, addiction and fragility with vivid colors and palpable grief.

Review: Houston Ballet’s ‘Peter Pan’ soars above expectations

Neverland has never been so magical. The last time choreographer Trey McIntyre’s “Peter Pan” appeared at the Wortham Theater Center for the Houston Ballet was ten years ago during the 2012-2013 season. This season, the show returned from Sept. 9 to Sept. 18 in full fashion, featuring fairies, flying flips and fantastical sets. 

Rice’s newest a cappella group chimes in on Chinese culture

Rice’s newest a cappella group, the Chimes, is adding to campus’s vibrant music community. According to the club’s vice president, Anita Zhou, it is the first and only Chinese a cappella group at Rice. Co-president Alexia Huang was inspired by the chimes, a Chinese instrument, in creating its name.

Houston’s Arte Público Press triumphs over ‘slings and arrows’ for 40th anniversary

Arte Público Press, the oldest and largest Latine publishing house in the nation, has never taken things by the books. Instead, they’ve promoted Latine writing and culture despite national pushback. The Press celebrated their 40th anniversary on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month with a performing arts gala held at the University of Houston’s Moores Opera House, featuring performances from Solero Flamenco, Brazilian dance company Sambabom, the Houston Grand Opera and more.

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09-21-2022 Crossword Solutions

09-21-2022 Crossword: "Queer Theory"

Inside the lives of Rice’s newest RAs

When Bianca Lopez arrived on the Rice campus in 2019, she received a warning about the resident associate program: “Only crazy people do that.” RAs, a unique feature of Rice’s residential college system, are adult members of the community who live alongside and support students in residential colleges, often with their partners and children. Despite the warning, Lopez, who works in asset management for Rice Management Company, was excited to get involved.

Explore culture and coffee in Houston’s Third Ward

Across State Highway 288 from Rice, the Third Ward neighborhood of Houston is an area teeming with rich history, great restaurants and fun activities. Our recommendations below are great starting points to get a better feel of Third Ward’s thriving culture and history. 

Rice pursues a NEWT solution for water treatment

For some, it is all too easy to take fresh water for granted. However, in many parts of the United States and the world, clean water is a commodity. Dozens of labs and organizations are working to solve this problem, including the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Center on Rice’s campus. The NEWT Center is an engineering research center that aims to advance global water-treatment technologies. Other universities — Arizona State University, University of Texas at El Paso and Yale University — are also involved with NEWT. Dr. Rafael Verduzco, a Rice professor and researcher at NEWT, said that the connections between these universities are an important part of the center.

Forgotten health professions: Checking in with Rice’s pre-health students

Rice has scores of undergraduates interested in pursuing a health profession. Roughly 40% of advising cases at the Office of Academic Advising are for health professions, according to Director of Academic Advising Christine Martinez. But many pre-health students — such as those looking to pursue dentistry, physical therapy or physician assistant — said they experience a lack of advising and resources compared to those offered to pre-meds. 

The Rice career fair fails Rice students

Comments like “What’s with the suit? What’s the occasion? Who’s getting married?” surrounded me as I strolled into my college commons one day last fall. It caught me off guard; why am I the only one dressed up on career fair day? My bioengineering friend quickly answered my question. “Why should I bother going to the career fair?” he said. “There’s no bioengineering companies there.” He’s absolutely right. But the problem extends beyond just bioengineering.

Dare to be wise

In the 18th Century, Immanuel Kant (often considered the central figure in modern philosophy) used the phrase Spaere aude in a 1784 essay titled “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment.”  Translated from Latin, it means “dare to know,” or in some cases, “dare to be wise.”  Kant argued our inability to think for ourselves was due to fear, not due to a lack of intellect.  In the opening paragraph of his essay, Kant states “Have the courage to use your own reason—that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Support diversity in the arts in Houston

The Oscars may be so white, but Houston art isn’t — as long as you’re looking in the right places. It is all too true that arts organizations still fall short of creating accessible spaces with equitable representation of artists. For instance, white men still make up the majority of artists represented in prominent museums across the United States. Even with increased attention to elevating the work of women artists and an uptick in women-only art shows and exhibitions focused on the work of underrepresented artists, only 11% of permanent acquisitions by major American art museums from 2008 to 2019 were by women; of that 11%, only 3.3.% were by Black women artists. 

09-14-2022 Crossword: "Moonshot"

09-13-2022 Crossword Solutions

Space City: The Rice-NASA relationship through the years

Anyone who has been on campus is bound to have heard the name “John F. Kennedy” repeated tens of times recently. Indeed, Rice hosted a number of events this past weekend to commemorate the 60th anniversary of JFK’s “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice stadium. Many of these events featured collaborations with NASA astronauts and administrators, marking just another result of the decades-long partnership between Rice and NASA.