COLUMN: Adaptation to campus is vital to life at Rice

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by Joe Xi Huang

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But newcomers to Houston from the U.S. and from beyond our national borders may still be struggling to come to terms with the environs of Rice and the city of Houston, even after Orientation Week.

Here are a couple of tips on how to adapt to your new surroundings and ease your life here.

Very few people have chosen to come to Rice embracing the heat. On the contrary, avoiding high temperature is one of the major themes in our leisure life. My idea: stay put and air-conditioned. Put your bed in the middle of the room so that you can reach all four corners easily, hence minimizing the heat emission from your own body.

Lie down as long as possible, and, believe me, it is not at all hard to do. I'm sure you'll come up with other ingenious strategies in the years to come.

As you might have already noticed, hundreds of trees, together with classic architecture, characterize the Rice campus. The canopies not only provide shade, but sustain a lively ecosystem. Squirrels scurry playfully up and down; they are the larger, heavier queens and kings compared with their cousins in the forests.

The birds twitter and flit around you if you feed them or dump upon you if you sit stupidly under a tree. Watch where you sit.

The roaches here are Texas-sized, and they move with eerie speed when you flip on the light at night.

They don't derive their food exclusively from nature. In fact, I believe they have a very similar diet to mine. Befriending them, giving yourself over to the tenets of animal rights, is the only way not to be "bugged" by the roaches.

Exercise is uncomfortable and requires a lot of effort, but they say that we have to do it to preserve our health. Just like when it comes to other things in life that we don't like much, we have a wide array of choices.

For instance, you can swim or lift weights at the gym. Playing tennis with friends can be fun; intramural soccer, basketball and volleyball teams draw multitudes. If you feel stifled by the campus boundaries, you can join those joggers orbiting the campus.

Even if you sweat frequently and have a sound mind, occasionally the visit of certain diseases is impossible to avoid.

But we can still make a virtue out of necessity: fighting illness is a means of knowing yourself biologically and pathologically.

Upon any hint of discomfort, stop whatever you're working on and saunter into Health Services, recline, open your mouth or close one eye, bring out all the cares and suspicions of the physician and then nip the ailment in the bud, all while your parents are still paying the bill.

Those who just said good bye to their high school sweetheart look forward to new love. Many Rice alumni fell in love during their four years here, so prepare to be inspired or fine-tuned by the magic.

A lesson from my solitary and lackluster college life is that misogynism doesn't pay.

If you don't think that you can afford the passion or the time, you can choose the studymate-lover type to score both good grades and affectionate returns.

Brace yourself, show your brightest feather and construct rhymes begin ning with "Roses are red, violets are blue ..."

The above are but snippets on how to enjoy life here. Through your own observations and communications with others in the future, you will gain abundant experience and devices to sail through your college years.

May you have a rewarding and multi-faceted life at Rice.

Joe Huang is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the September 27, 1996 issue.

Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights Reserved.
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