Al Bula said:
Never met a rice OG undergrad alum under 50 that's not a complete effing weirdo. Even the older ones are odd sperging ducks.
Lots of friends and acquaintances who did the work-paid MBA, those cats are excluded.
Yes yes I realize the irony here that I am an Aggie who is calling other school alumni weird. There are some super cringe Ags out there, but rice undergrads are truly out there.
As a former Rice student I can agree with this.
Long story short- blew out my knee badly my senior year of HS and all the big programs that had been recruiting me backed off so I went and played at Rice which was the only school to still offer me (besides Ivies and they don't give athletic scholarships). Was there for my freshman year and the fall of my sophomore year when I blew out my knee again and the doctors medically retired me so I transferred to A&M which was my #1 choice to begin with anyway. And despite having lost my "Ag" tag here under a former username or two back via a purge of permabans in the fran era my diploma says Texas A&M.
In my experience, the Ags who are super cringe are usually the ones who are
WAAAAAAY too Aggie. I'm talking about wearing painted overalls, giving your kids overly Aggie names (like folks who've named their kids Kyle, Kyleigh, Sully, etc- I used to know a guy who's last name started with a "G" and he named all his kids with "A" names so their initials would be "A.G."), and similar such behavior. For example, I know a guy who was so enraged by some little kid in a tea-sip t-shirt that gave him a "hook 'em" sign at Academy who proceeded to tell this kid (in his telling the kid was about 8) that "Santa isn't real" and he was proud of it in telling the story. I mean, come on man, that's ridiculous- just tell the kid he's adopted or something.
Anyway, you can generally exclude athletes from the overall weirdness at Rice, but, the typical student there is the absurdly smart but socially awkward kid from your HS. The band geek or drama club weirdo. Usually pretty harmless but very often with no interests outside academic pursuits and wound pretty tight. Some loosen up and grow out of it but a lot don't. It may have changed since I was there in 1995/96 but the athletes didn't interact much outside of class with the main student body and there were less than 10 chicks in the entire 2500 or so undergrad student body who would have been considered hot on any other normal campus. I've had buddies in the military talk about chicks being "Iraq hot" when they were deployed- same concept. At least back then a 9 at Rice was probably a 5 at A&M. In fact, it was pretty refreshing when, as I call it, I transferred "home to A&M" to have chicks who were hotter than any girl at Rice pursue me because at Rice every single chick who wasn't completely ugly had 30 different guys pursuing her.