Rice highlights graduating seniors

STORY/VIDEOS PITCH

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Rice highlights graduating seniors

HOUSTON – (May 9, 2016) – This week Rice University will celebrate its 103rd commencement.

Below are profiles of 12 graduating seniors who offer a snapshot of Rice’s Class of 2016. Videos of the graduating students can be watched by clicking on the video title. The full video playlist can be found here.

Saturday’s graduation ceremony will start at 8:30 a.m. in the Academic Quad unless the weather warrants it to be moved indoors at Tudor Fieldhouse. The commencement address will be delivered by Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize and one of Newsweek’s “150 Women Who Shake the World.”

Tom Carroll
From escaping Ohio’s snow to becoming Rice’s 12th Rhodes Scholar
Tom Carroll parlayed his research at the intersection of science and the humanities to become Rice’s 12th Rhodes Scholar this past fall.

A native of Ohio and raised by a family of scientists, the double major in biochemistry and classical studies said he found in Rice a place where he could “get away from all the snow” of his home state and pursue his passion for both learning about ancient Greece and Rome and advancing lifesaving scientific discovery in the lab

Jazz Silva
Overcoming adversity to become an advocate
For Jazz Silva, college has been about more than classroom learning. As president of the Student Association, Silva has learned to advocate for others and also to ask for help herself.

The cognitive science major was diagnosed with epilepsy during her sophomore year. She decided to start the semester, but as her condition worsened, she found she could not keep up with her classes.

“Lucky for us, at Rice when you hit rock bottom, there’s 50 people in line waiting to pick you up, and there’s 50 people who have been in your exact same position,” Silva said. “And the second I put my pride away, things started to turn around for me.”

Cesar Udave
The first-generation college student
Senior Cesar Udave looks back on his four years at Rice University as one of the best of what he hopes will be a lifetime of “good decisions.” Udave, a mechanical engineering major, was one of the university’s first Rice Emerging Scholars, a program for a select group of incoming freshmen that helps them acclimate to the demands of university life as engineering or natural sciences students and familiarizes them with undergraduate research opportunities.

Derek Brown
Changing direction
Friendswood, Texas, native Derek Brown admitted to being a bit of a wallflower when he came to Rice. However, his experience at the university – including his involvement with the Young Owls Leadership Program – has helped him to “slowly but surely step off away from that wall.”

“The journey that I’ve had here and this experience have allowed me to … feel comfortable in the community that I have lived in,” Brown said.

Mary Charlotte Carroll
One who found Rice’s ‘hidden gem’
“Humanities are the hidden gem of Rice,” said Mary Charlotte Carroll, a history and Asian studies major.

A native of Beaumont in East Texas, Carroll said she found a cherished home in the School of Humanities. “The biggest thing for me is … the quality of the professors that we have here,” she said. “There is so much individualized attention that you get as a humanities student. Also, it’s very, very easy to be involved in humanities research.”

Carroll is leading the creation of Rice’s first undergraduate history research journal, the Rice Historical Review, which will be published this spring. “It’s an opportunity for humanities students to show off the really wonderful, original work that they’ve been doing and to share that with the Rice community,” she said.

Beko Jang
Biology, country and education
Beko Jang’s interests – biology, country and education – are very different, but all have one common link: service.

After spending his first semester at Rice in 2010, Jang decided to return to his native South Korea to serve in the military. During that time he was attached to a special division that worked with U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea.

“(The) mission (of my division) is to ease the transition of U.S. soldiers who are operating in South Korea,” said Jang, a bioengineering major. “I was chosen to be the detachment interpreter to the commander of a division. I did that for two years and then came back (to Rice) in 2013.”

Lucas Sanchez
The mathematician musician
Lucas Sanchez is the perfect example of an “unconventional” Rice student. The Albuquerque, N.M., native is graduating this week with not one, not two, but three degrees – and one of them is a master’s degree (in percussion performance).

Sanchez said his two undergraduate degree majors – mathematics and music (percussion performance) – are more similar than one might expect. And he said it’s nice to have them as a break from one another.

Claire O’Malley
Merging art and engineering
The Rice campus has been a fertile landscape of opportunities for Claire O’Malley. The San Francisco native, a double major in mechanical engineering and visual and dramatic arts, has made her mark from the art studios of Sewall Hall to the shop floors of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

“I was really excited about coming to Rice and being able to study studio arts and engineering, and to marry those two and do something interesting with that,” said O’ Malley, who is serving as the co-director of the student-run Matchbox Gallery in Sewall Hall. “I’ve always had a super-intense creative impulse. When I came to Rice, my idea of art was spun 180 degrees. I was exposed to diverse types of art. I interacted with people who think of art differently than I did.” O’Malley said during her four years at Rice, her understanding of the importance of art and her impulse to make art have changed.

Stacey Yi
Dream big
Stacey Yi, who is from Fremont, Calif., and is graduating with degrees in ecology and evolutionary biology, started at Rice University with the desire to spend her life helping other people.

She found many opportunities to do just that. She became involved with Rice’s Pancakes for Parkinson’s fundraiser and Rice’s chapter of Colleges Against Cancer and volunteered at a hospice for patients with HIV and AIDS.

Yi said that through these experiences and the people she met at Rice, she learned about Camp Kesem, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to helping children through and beyond their parents’ cancer treatment. She worked to help found a Rice chapter, something that she said was very meaningful to her.

Kara Dugall
The goalie who saves dogs’ lives
Last fall, senior Kara Dugall of McKinney, Texas, wrapped up her soccer career as a goalkeeper for the Rice Owls. But her most important saves happened away from the pitch and on the Houston streets.

While at Rice she started Bluebelle’s Rescue, a nonprofit that is dedicated to feeding and rescuing stray dogs in Houston.

“We go out to an area in South Houston and feed 40-60 dogs, take pictures of them, post them and work to get them off the streets,” she said. “We try to educate people out there about keeping dogs healthy and keeping them and feeding them. Since 2014 we’ve rescued and found homes for over 300 dogs and a few cats.”

Sophie Eichner
The artist who became an architect
Four years ago when Sophie Eichner walked around the Rice School of Architecture, she “had this overwhelming gut feeling that I could live here and work here,” she said. Now as she looks back at her undergraduate career, she believes her hunch was right.

Eichner is originally from Paris and grew up in Richmond, Va.

She has spent most of her time at Rice University in Anderson Hall working toward her goal of becoming an architect. When she’s not burning the midnight oil in the Rice School of Architecture, you can find her championing the arts through student exhibitions, student-built public art like the Soundworm! or creative drawing exhibits like Sumi Ink Club.

Isabel Scher
Not what are you going to do, but why do it?
Rice University senior Isabel Scher is among the 111 students chosen for the inaugural class of Schwarzman Scholars. She will receive a fully funded scholarship for postgraduate study at the new Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The Schwarzman Scholars program is designed to prepare its graduates to build stronger relationships between China and the rapidly changing world and to address the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. The scholars were chosen on the basis of intellectual capacity and leadership potential from more than 3,000 applicants.

Scher, from Tenafly, N.J., will pursue a master’s degree in economics and business at Tsinghua after she completes her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science at Rice.

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All videos courtesy Brandon Martin/Rice University.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,910 undergraduates and 2,809 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for best quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.