i’m sorting through papers i inherited from past Student Admissions Council staff directors… and i found the binder for Owl Weekend 1997. this is the owl weekend that i attended as a high school senior… the weekend that convinced me that rice was where i wanted to be.
it is almost eerie to flip through the pages and see the names of “owls” (prospective students) who came that weekend. i took out a few pages with names like seth eatinger, julie edwards, amber garrison, craig harrison, laura balzano, kendall moseley… i saw the names of j.p. slavinsky and margaret van meter (who are now married)… i saw names of people i never knew, who didn’t come to rice, and i wonder what life would have been like if they *had* come.
i get a little shiver when i think about all of us descending upon campus, with little idea of what was to come… and now i look back and i see more than just names, i see paths that were built and shaped at rice, paths that lead to now. and i smile a little secret, slightly wistful smile.
wow…that is amazing. i remember michelle glassman and my first kegger…and running into you in physics lec, and meeting seth. and talking to a girl named mara from atlanta, also making the same decision between rice and dartmouth. she chose dartmouth…but we met up again four years later, when she came to visit her best friend, my roommate amy, in boston!
most of all, i remember knowing, just knowing, that even though i didn’t particularly want to go to school 25 minutes from where i grew up, that rice just felt right. that it felt like the place i should land. and it was.