The Rice School of Architecture is a design school, offering educational and professional experience of exceptional scope at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Within a liberal arts context, Rice architecture students explore traditional methods of inquiry along with innovative techniques and ideas now reshaping the profession. Students refine their design skills in digital studios, in projects set in the ever-changing city of Houston, and in the Preceptorship Program at premier architecture firms in the U.S. and abroad.

The School of Architecture faculty are leading practitioners, critics, and scholars who bring the highest levels of achievement to Rice classrooms and studios. Recent accomplishments include exhibits of faculty work in Houston, Pittsburgh, and Cambridge; acquisitions of designed objects by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and noted built projects, architecture, and design commissions. Faculty work has received numerous national and regional awards and citations from professional societies and prestigious magazine programs.

The mission of the School of Continuing Studies (SCS) is to meet the educational needs of the wider community in a way that articulates the quality and standards of Rice University. Established in 1967, Continuing Studies offers more than 250 continuing education courses annually in arts, humanities, sciences, foreign languages, communication skills, information technology, and personal and professional development. Many courses each year are cosponsored by cultural institutions and community organizations. The School has nearly 10,000 enrollments each year.

SCS offers the largest selection of noncredit humanities courses of any college or university in Texas. Its language program is one of the largest in the state with more than 2,000 enrollments in 2002-2003. The Foreign Language Program offers courses in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Students from 41 countries have enrolled in the English as a Second Language Program.

Continuing Studies also offers several programs of regional and national stature, including a professional development program for human resource management professionals, one of the largest in the nation. The Rice University Advanced Placement Summer Institute for teachers of Advanced Placement courses is one of the largest in the country. In 2002, Continuing Studies introduced a CFP® Certification Education Program for financial planners, and in 2003 the School introduced exam prep programs for Chartered Financial Analysts® and Certified Treasury Professionals.

In addition to its noncredit offerings, SCS administers Rice’s for-credit Summer School program, which enrolls approximately 200 undergraduate students in more than 50 courses annually.

The School of Humanities conducts research and teaching in the core disciplines of a modern liberal arts education. Humanities students at Rice choose from 13 academic departments, including art history, classics, English and foreign languages, history, kinesiology, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, and visual arts. Several interdisciplinary majors are available also, such studies in women and gender, Asian studies, ancient Mediterranean civilizations, and medieval studies. The School is the home of two major national journals, Studies in English Literature and the Journal of Southern History. Students may study thirteen foreign languages through the Center for the Study of Languages, which uses state of the art computer-based instructional techniques. The Center for the Study of Cultures sponsors numerous seminars and events each year that augment the courses offered by the School.

Faculty in the School have a reputation of being among the best undergraduate teachers in the university. Every faculty member, even the most senior, is expected to teach undergraduate courses. Rice humanities faculty have been named the Carnegie National Professor of the Year and the Carnegie Texas Professor of the Year. In addition, faculty in the school are prolific scholars. Their contributions to research have been recognized through numerous external awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Jones School is at the forefront of business education. While many business schools continue to emphasize theory, Rice is one of only two that requires every student to take their classroom knowledge into a real business setting, developing crucial leadership and managerial skills. In the Jones School's Action Learning Project, completed toward the end of the first year, student teams consult full-time with a company to solve a specific problem. The required second-year entrepreneurship course--one of the few required courses of its kind in the nation--and numerous experimental-learning-based electives provide additional opportunities for students to put their knowledge to work.

In every course, students have an unparalleled opportunity to work one-on-one with accessible, involved, and energetic faculty members. The faculty maintain an important balance between teaching and research, believing that current industry knowledge is as critical as textbooks. All of the school's instructors are either academics with significant business or consulting experience, or business executives with significant classroom experience who teach specialized elective courses. Faculty members are recognized as leaders in their fields and in teaching--Ed Williams was named one of the nation's two best entrepreneurial instructors by Business Week. Business Week also ranks Rice among the ten schools -- including Stanford, Berkeley and Chicago -- best able to balance real-world professionals and traditional faculty.

Demonstrating the high quality of their education, Rice MBA graduates are much sought-after. In the 2003 U.S. News and World Report "Best Business Schools," Rice was number one for graduates employed at three months. The Financial Times, 2003, named Rice number one among U.S. schools for career progress, and the degree to which alumni have moved up the career ladder three years after graduating. According to the Financial Times, Rice ranks in the top ten among all private American business schools on "value for money" along with Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Columbia, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. The school's finance and entrepreneurship programs were ranked among the ten best in the world by the Financial Times, 2003.

Among the top ten percent of American business schools, the Jones School offers the MBA degree, the MBA for Executives degree, and joint MBA/ME and MBA/MD degrees. Rice University Executive Education offers a full schedule of noncredit executive education and customized courses for business and industry.

The Shepherd School is housed in the extraordinary Alice Pratt Brown Hall, a showplace for the entire university. The $22 million facility stands as a testament to the Shepherd School's rise to excellence. In addition to the plethora of private studios, practice rooms, rehearsal halls, recording and electronic music studios, Alice Pratt Brown Hall is home to three of Houston's finest performance spaces: Stude Concert Hall, Duncan Recital Hall and the Edythe Bates Old Recital Hall. Hailed for outstanding acoustics and superior design, the performance halls welcome more than 70,000 music lovers each year.

Shepherd School students receive individualized instruction from internationally acclaimed artist teachers and perform in ensembles comprised of musicians at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels.

In the six departments within the Wiess School, faculty at the forefront of their fields are exploring natural phenomena from basic particles to the origin of the universe on scales from nanometers to light years. Their research projects range from the nature of the earth to the fundamental properties of living organisms and communities, from complex mathematical approaches to assembling designed, functional nanostructures. Rice professors have pioneered the field of nanotechnology, which holds promise for developing super-strong yet lightweight materials, semiconductors, new drug delivery systems, superconductors, and much more. In teaching laboratories, modular structures allow flexibility and creativity in learning.

Novel contexts for students and faculty to work together on collaborative projects are found in the interdisciplinary settings of our institutes and centers - Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Keck Center for Computational Biology, Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Rice Quantum Institute, Gulf Coast Consortia and Rice Space Institute. These efforts may encompass other institutions - Baylor College of Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, NASA, University of Texas Health Science Center, University of Texas Medical Branch, University of Houston - and work that involves a number of corporations. These unique constellations of students, faculty and collaborators provide unusual exposure to a variety of research efforts and engage both graduate and undergraduate students in cutting edge research.

The School of Social Sciences is very young and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2003. It is also one of the smallest schools at Rice, with fewer faculty members than the schools of natural sciences, engineering, and the humanities. But despite its small size, more students major in the social sciences than any other school at Rice.

The School of Social Sciences contains the departments of Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. Every department teaches a wide variety of undergraduate courses, so that students can be educated broadly in a discipline. Each department also wants its students to develop a deeper understanding of at least one aspect of its offerings; therefore, all departments, except Sociology, have small but
high-quality graduate programs. More information about the departments in the social sciences can be found at their individual websites. Although the faculty in the social sciences conduct research on a variety of topics, there is also a strong commitment to undergraduate education. Traditionally faculty members in the social sciences win almost half of all the teaching awards given at Rice.

The School of Social Sciences also contains a number of interdisciplinary programs. These programs bring together knowledge and insight from a number of departments, providing undergraduates with the opportunity to major in subjects that do not fall neatly into traditional disciplinary categories. Majors in Cognitive Science are engaged in the multidisciplinary study of the mind. Managerial Studies provides an understanding of the environment in which businesses and other organizations exist, and of the tools used by managers. Policy Studies majors learn to analyze and evaluate public policy and gain an understanding of the policy making process.

Despite the size, the School of Social Sciences maintains a strong commitment to excellence, both in the classroom and in research. To explore the opportunities in the social sciences, visit their website at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dssc.