In his spare time, Will Rice college senior Abhishek Nag, an electrical engineering major, started a business with his friends. Embarking on an entrepreneurial effort that surpasses the typical lemonade stand-esque simplicity of most college student businesses, they founded SimpApply.
Robert Redford's Sundance Cinema will open in Bayou Place on Nov. 1, taking over the space vacated by the Angelika Film Center last Sept., according to a press release issued last Thursday by the City of Houston.
Brown College Master Steven Cox folds a crane in the Brown commons as part of a project by Agape Christian Ministries to assemble at least 1,000 paper cranes to send to Japan.
Rice has instituted a new policy by which students who are a semester behind graduating with their matriculating class may partake in walking across the stage during Commencement (see story, pg. 1). This new policy arrives after years of students with valid reasons being denied the opportunity to walk with their class; nonetheless, we expect this long-needed change will be very well received.
As prospies flood Rice's campus for Owl Days, current Rice students survey the high-schoolers with keen interest to catch a glimpse of what the Class of 2015 might look like. While Will Ricers are already busy looking for bikers to recruit, everyone else is busy gauging the prospective class' sociability, ability to integrate, and of course attractiveness. However, no matter how hard we seek to assess the class of 2015 through the Owl Day prospies, we will be unsuccessful because Owl Days omits a vital aspect of Rice — diversity.
What a semester it has been for theater! Rice has recently hosted everything from the drama of a Shakespeare tragedy to the glamour of an Elton John musical and now Cougar High, a student-written performance. Martel College junior and composition major Keith Allegretti has crafted a unique specimen of the stage that is at once a tribute to cheap humor, a parody of common fictional tropes and even a satire of public education and the discrimination faced by homosexuals. Most refreshingly, however, it is simply an irreverent farce with no aspirations to five-star reviews or the Sammys, with no expectations higher than to make its audience reel with both disgust and laughter. While low production values and the show's very nature make it an experience that not just anyone could sit through, those who aren't easily offended and can stomach some gross-out humor will find it well worth their while.
Recently, my car was towed at Rice University. I spent an hour looking for it before I learned what happened. This situation has affected at least two other people I know, one person twice.
The Thresher sat down for short interviews with Bioengineering Lecturer Renata Ramos and her husband Lenin Terrazas, Wiess College's new Resident Associates.
In the relentless world of top-20 academic institutions, Rice succesfully poached the best of the best for its next dean of engineering. Edwin Thomas was the chair of MIT's material sciences department, the best in the country. The addition of faculty of Thomas's caliber is definitely an accomplishment, and his mere presence gives further validation to our already strong engineering department.
The outpouring of support at Rice for Japan has been simply extraordinary. Conscious groups of students have gathered and implemented massive efforts to raise funds for the recovery process.
Rice University recently announced a plan to rejuvenate its webmail system by transferring over to a Google interface and google servers. This decision will definitely yield improvement over the current webmail, and it is certainly exciting to see administration and IT making a proactive decision to shift our outdated system to one of the best and most proven email clients on the market.
The Baker Institute Student Forum hosted a student debate on March 22 about the current job market and whether President Barack Obama's policies have had a positive or negative impact so far.
With all the coverage of exciting environmental initiatives on campus recently, Rice looks from the outside like a leader in sustainable living. We have classes dedicated solely to green campus initiatives, top-notch LEED certified buildings, green roofs, single-stream recycling, bike sharing programs and even part of our tuition now goes toward improving our carbon footprint. There's no doubt that Rice students are smart enough to know about the importance of maintaining a sustainable lifestyle, but are we smart enough to care?
Why has animation been so popular these days? Recently, Avatar, a 3-D animation-heavy film about a planet of blue human-alien hybrids, became the highest grossing film of all time. Pixar, the studio that produced animated films such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, has also produced great commercial successes worldwide.
Rice Theater's production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is unconventional and unusual in almost every aspect. It's a musical squeezed into a single act that runs a mere hour and a half without a single scene change; yet even with this breakneck pace, the viewer becomes acquainted with a disparate gang of middle schoolers all competing for spelling bee glory and the chance to continue to the national competition in Washington D.C.
With seven top-10 finishes in the year, including a second place finish against a stacked field at the recent Duck Invitational on Mar. 21- 22, senior Michael Whitehead was bound to break through at some point. That point came on Saturday at the 60th Border Olympics in Laredo, when Whitehead finished with a final-round 62 for his first collegiate victory.
