Rice University President Reginald DesRoches and his wife Paula took up a post along the main path of the Academic Quad Monday night, shaking hands and trading greetings with what amounted to the entire undergraduate student body currently on campus. Residential college by residential college, students streamed in for the couple’s annual O-Week welcome, then scattered across a lawn.
Yard games claimed the grass: volleyball, badminton, cornhole, chess, checkers, Connect Four and a Jenga tower built to undergraduate ambition. Booths ringing the perimeter handed out boba tea, ice cream and cotton candy, and a claw machine tent sent lucky students off with stuffed owls. DJ Mei worked the crowd from the decks while the Marching Owl Band and Rice Cheer performed and Sammy the Owl held court for photos.
The evening built to the campuswide O-Week dance, the one piece of choreography every Owl learns before a single class syllabus. Students packed the center of the Quad to run through it together, and the whole event dissolved from there into a giant student dance party.
