Rice University Application Essays

I was white. I was so unbearably white. I walked into this madhouse – this dizzyingly varied place, filled with new and different sights, sounds, and even smells. I plunged into the teeming throng of diversity with apprehension. Jostling my way to my first ever…

“I want to go to the Monkey Room!” Slightly exasperated, I look down at the screaming six-year-old child and try desperately to remember the training on “collaborative problem solving.” Step One: Find a place of empathy with the child. “You really want to go to…

Papers were sprawled on my desk. Books were stacked two feet high. I was sitting in my cubicle, hunched over old lectures, trying to learn the jargon of rocket science. My eyes squinted at the tiny text as I stumbled through the abstruse vocabulary. Hydrazine,…

Staring into the dark emptiness at the back of my eyelids, I discern the sounds around me. I hear the water splash as I sit cross-legged on the moss-covered boulder in the middle of Bald Hill Stream. A raindrop falls somewhere to my left and…

The smell of saltwater drifted on the breeze. I walked down the dimly illuminated path, palm trees to my side and stars above my head, searching for my destination. Clad in a suit and tie, I readied myself for the extravagant night ahead of me….

She can’t read; she can’t count; she doesn’t even know her own age. But she is caring, creative, inspirational, and extraordinarily gifted in the art of listening. In the novel “Momo,” Michael Ende’s unconventional character, Momo, is a little girl who is known to her…

On the sofas in my home theater, I watched Riley struggle to come to terms with her new home in Inside Out, John Nash contribute to game theory in spite of his frequent hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind, and Nina differentiate reality from fantasy as…

Slapping away yet another mosquito, I scrabbled and slid on the rough, gravel path. The steam rising from the earth fogged my glasses and gave credence to the affectionate nickname we had for this place: ‘Hell’. It was the summer after sophomore year, and I…

I revel in an eccentric painting of a curled up, blue-haired woman; I overhear a girl rehearsing a classical monologue, maybe Shakespeare; I soak in the haunting sound of a violinist playing a Tchaikovsky concerto in a nearby classroom. Walking down the green and orange…

Sliding in a zigzag pattern down the slope, I descend the mountain. Halfway down the trail, I reach a small terrain park. Below me lay a number of jumps and grind boxes. Seeing nobody below me, I push off toward the first jump. Snowflakes bash…