Claire “CJ” Friend’s days at Rice University move quickly, shifting between literature, data and the stage. By the time she leaves campus after rehearsal, the clock often pushes toward 10 p.m. But for the Jones College junior, the pace reflects the freedom she came to Rice to find.
Friend is majoring in statistics and English and minoring in theatre, an interdisciplinary path that grew out of both practicality and curiosity. She arrived at Rice planning to pursue mathematics or another STEM-heavy field.
“I ended up changing to statistics because I took AP stats in my senior year in high school, and I really liked it out of all the math classes I’d taken,” Friend said.
Her interest in the humanities developed alongside her analytical work. Friend briefly considered other disciplines before realizing English offered a natural bridge to another longtime passion.
“It’s kind of like an avenue to study theater as well as dramatic literature,” Friend said.
Friend serves as executive coordinator for Rice Players, the university’s student-run theater organization, helping coordinate productions and promote performances while also performing on stage. Much of her time outside class is spent working on logistics, publicity and creative collaboration for upcoming shows.
“Theater is definitely shaping my experience at Rice because it’s what I find myself doing the most of when I’m not just working on coursework,” Friend said.
Last summer, Friend also expanded her studies beyond Houston through Rice Global’s Paris Summer Program. She traveled to France to take the course Romanticism: Race, Ruins and Revolution taught by Alexander Regier, the William Faulkner Professor of English and chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing. The experience blended academic exploration with a return to another earlier interest. Friend studied French extensively in high school and saw the program as a chance to reconnect with the language while fulfilling an English major requirement.
For Friend, the freedom to pursue seemingly unrelated passions such as data analysis, literature and performance is one of the defining advantages of studying at Rice.
“The way I explain it to myself whenever I feel super busy and I’m like, ‘Why am I even doing this?’ is I think undergrad is just a rare opportunity to study anything that you might have curiosity for at a very high level,” Friend said. “I’m just trying to satiate as many curiosities as I can for right now.”