The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 79, No. 2, Ed. 1 Friday, August 23, 1991 Page: 1 of 16
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Rice Thresher
VOLUME 75, NO. 2
i
IS THAT A BANANA YOU'RE ARRESTING OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME?
Counseling center changes organization to help students actively
by Lorie List
A new name and new staff mem-
bers transformed Rice Psychiatric
Services into the Rice Counseling
Center this summer. In July, psy-
chologist Lindley Doran became the
director of the new center. Doran
spent the previous ten years at
Southern Methodist University as
Associate Director of the Counseling
Center.
Doran said the whole concept of
the center has changed. Instead of
utilizing one on one therapy like
Psychiatric Services, the staff will
now prepare programs to work within
the residential colleges.
The Counseling Center added
psychologists to the staff to increase
the diversity of possible therapy.
Psychologist Deborah Story has been
hired as a full-time assistant director
and staff psychiatrist Stan Dean will
continue to work with the center. In
addition, four psychiatrists from
Baylor College of Medicine will serve
a six-month residency at the center.
One of the center's goals is to do
more research on students' attitudes
and concerns. "It will help us pro-
gram [activities] better if we know
what issues are out there," Doran
said.
We want to see people
use us as consultants
to the whole academic
environment.'
—Lindley Doran
Doran said the center's emphasis
will shift from dealing mainly with
crisis problems to taking an active
part in teaching how to deal with
college students' typical develop-
mental problems before the prob-
lems get out of control.
"We want to see people use us as
consultants to the whole academic
environment," Doran said.
Another new staff member is
Students struggle to haul a sofa up a flight of stairs in Hanszen College.
The 624 new students arriving on campus this summer were selected
from a record-setting 6028 applicants, up from 5289 last year.
Some other stats:
•The male-to-female ratio has changed by only 1 percentage point; to
59%to-41% from 60%-to-40%.
•The class of 1995 includes 249 National Merit Scholars, asppposed
to 182 for the class of 1994.
• 132 of the new students were the valedictorians of their high school
class. 74% were in the top 5% of their class and 83% were in the top 10%.
• 192 of the students expressed an interest in science majors; 187 in
majors in the humanities and social sciences; 185 in engineering; 37 in
music; and 23 in architecture.
•The middle 50%of the class spored between 1210 and 1430 on their
SATs.
•The distribution between Texas and out-of-state students is almost
exactly 50%-50%. Ten foreign countries are represented.
•Tlie yield, or percentage of students accepting Rice's offer, also
increased this year, from 47% to 50%.
Dean of Admissions Richard Stabell said the change in yield is
unusual, especially considering the increase in applications. "Usually,
when something like that happens you expect the yield to go down.
"People are beginning to investigate Rice and in doing so are finding
this is a great alternative to some of the other expensive schools.
"We're becoming known," he said. "People are finding out about us
for the first time."
Danielle McWilliams. McWilliams, a
recent graduate ofTeachers College,
Columbia University, began her du-
ties as Residence Life Counselor and
Sid Richardson Residential Associ-
ate in late July.
The position of Residence Life
Counselor was created to integrate
the center into student life and coor-
dinate its activities with the colleges
or organizations with similar objec-
tives or goals like Health Education.
While McWilliams is not a psycholo-
gist, she recently received her MA
in Student Personnel Administration
and has worked extensively with The
Julliard School in New York to de-
velop its residence life program.
McWilliams described her job as
one which will provide a link between
students and the counseling center.
Through community-wide program-
ming, McWilliams hopes to address
needs and concerns before problems
happen, rather than react to problems
after they arise.
McWilliams said she can't yet
predict the most prevalent problems
at Rice. "I can't tell what Rice needs
until I spend a lot of time here. I can't
know what Rice needs until I know
SEE COUNSELORS, PAGE 7
\
wmmm.
New Director of Rice Psychiatric Services Lindley Doran.
Rice switches to 80% Houston water
Will Rice advisor helps her freshman unload the car.
by Louis Evan Spiegler
Rice University began buying
water from the City of Houston to
mix with its own well water earlier
this summer in response to a strong
recommendation by The Harris-
Galveston Coastal Subsidence Dis-
trict.
Before the July 1 changeover, Rice
used its own water exclusively, but
the University now uses a 2(W6-80%
mixture of well and city sources.
The changeover was approved
by The Board of Governors and cost
$240,000.
According to Bill Mack, Director
of Facilities and Engineering, the
university had no choice in the mat-
ter. "The subsidence district board
said "you've got to stop using your
wells.'"The motivation for the change
is land subsidence, slipping, and de-
terioration of the grou nd, all of wh ich
can be caused by depleted water
wells.
The effects of this change will not
be noticeable initially but will soon
have a small financial impact on the
Rice Community.
The university currently con-
sumes 244 million gallons of water
per year, as much of a quarter of
which is used for the colleges. In the
past the cost was negligible, but it
now costs $5.94 per 1,000 gallons.
Part of this will be reflected in next
year's student housing costs, an in-
crease of a few dollars per month for
students.
Food and Housing is aware of the
increases and is putting some water
conservation measures into effect.
There will be tighter control over the
current cooling tower, and a new one
is being constructed. The new cool-
ing tower is more efficient," said
Mack. "It has one-half the water
\osses oi Xhe o\<J lower."
Student Association President
Mitra Miller said she is aware of the
changes, but said, "If Rice doesn't
have a choice, Rice doesn't have a
choice." She also mentioned a need
for a larger conservation effort. The
S.A. is organizing a campus-wide
conservation effort that will involve
not only water but electricity."
Director of Student Activities
Sarah Nelson Crawford said that it is
important for students to "preserve
what we have."
Students are testing shower heads
that use less water. Crawford said
that her office would be making an
effort to promote conservation, a so-
lution also supported by Miller and
the Physical Plant.
University restructures NSCI courses
by Peter Howley
Natural Science (NSCI) 101 and
102 have been restructured for the
fourth time, said F. Curtis Michel of
the DepartmentofSpace Physics and
Astronomy. Michel supervised the
restructuring of the classes. These
foundation courses (or exemption
exams) are required of all non-sci-
ence/engineering majors.
The new NSCI program will in-
clude two large lectures on Mondays
and Wednesdays and a recitation on
Fridays.
Roughly one hundred students
will attend each lecture. Michel will
teach both sections.
This marks a major change from
last year's courses, which were bro-
ken down into seven small sections
taught by seven different professors
from various natural science depart-
ments.
' "I know that this is not the ideal
teaching situation," said Michel. "We
would have liked to have smaller
classes, but we couldn't find a suitable
text."
James Kinsey, Dean of Natural
Sciences, said, "I'm concerned about
going back to the big lecture format
because I thought last year was an
improvement" over the previou s large
lecture format.
Kinsey said that in last year's
evaluations, "there didn't seem to be
an overpowering sentiment that the
smaller lecture format was better."
"Student evaluations have been
very influential in gu iding the course
Michel said. "We paid a lot of atten-
tion to the comments."
Michel intends to alter the
course's presentation in other ways
as well. "The spirit of the course is to
introduce students to concepts," he
We wanted to create a
course in which
anybody that tried hard
could pass it.'
—Curtis Michel
said. To achieve that, concepts will
be taught "horizontally" instead of
"vertically," meaning that they will
not build on each other sequentially.
This technique was designed to
compensate for the inherent inequi-
ties of a course that rewards students
who already have a background in
the class.
"We wanted to create a course in
which anybody that tried hard could
pass it," he said.
The recitations work toward ac-
complishing this goal. Students will
be given written multiple-choice tests
on lectures and readings. There will
be ten recitation sections of roughly
20 students each.
The recitation leaders will be
professors from the departments of
Computer Science, Geology, Math-
ematics, and Electrical Engineering.
The content of the course, which
has included introductory calculus,
physics and chemistry, will be essen-
tially unchanged.
This is the first year that the De-
partment of Space Physics and As-
tronomy will head the course. Pre-
viously, Stephen Baker of the Phys-
ics department organized it.
Michel volunteered to redesign
the course when the Physics de-
partment finished its third year of
running NSCI.
Feature
Matriculation
•••Goes
bananas
See page 8
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Zitterkopf, Ann & Howe, Harlan. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 79, No. 2, Ed. 1 Friday, August 23, 1991, newspaper, August 23, 1991; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245787/m1/1/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.