Spring 2021 events and resources for prospective students

Each year, the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) looks forward to dozens of students visiting our impressive campus, meeting with current students and faculty, and attending our signature Night at the Museum event, hosted in partnership with departments across campus. Unfortunately, in this unconventional year, many students could not make their traditional campus visit to Rice - so GPS looked to unconventional solutions to showcase life at Rice.

On Feb. 24 - 27, we hosted 72 Hours of Rice via the Whova platform. This was a collection of events designed to showcase our campus, our city, and our student community. Prospects were treated to virtual tours of the Houston Zoo and the Houston Museum of Natural Science, yoga, meditation and Salsa classes hosted by our graduate students, a movie night, and an activities fair showcasing twenty student organizations and administrative offices across campus. Year after year, the feedback we get from visiting students is that they are blown away by the care and concern faculty, staff and students have for each other and our community. We are happy that 2021 was no different, and we are grateful to these organizations for their partnership.

Our departments have worked hard and creatively to adapt traditional recruiting weekends to a virtual environment to give prospective students a good sense of the life they’d enjoy at Rice. Video tours, coffee chats with current students, game nights and online dinners helped create community and connection between admits and their programs. GPS was happy to support an idea library for programs to use and contribute to as they continue to move through the spring recruiting season.

We are grateful to Ian Mellor-Crummey and Mario Norton for their hard work in creating a tour video for our prospective 2021 cohort. Ian photographed a dozen different campus locations at a multitude of angles and stitched the images together to create a 360° video tour (best watched with a Google Cardboard or other VR viewer, but accessible by desktop and mobile as well). To share this tour with students, GPS arranged for enough VR viewers and a welcome card for each admitted student and worked with departments on distribution.

In addition to this 360° video, GPS also offered Departmental Graduate Student Associations (DGSAs) and major graduate student organizations a GoPro camera and kit. Additionally, we advertised a video competition called “Rice Bytes” where students could submit a 60-second video of life at Rice to receive a free lunch from GPS. While many programs are still utilizing these cameras to create content, a playlist of some of the recruiting videos created to date can be found here.

As our application season approaches a close, we look forward to connecting with prospective students for 2022-23!