Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Winter 2002

Taking the Honors
Winter 2002
VOL.58, NO.2
Taking the Honors
When the 16 undergraduate students who are gathered in Duncan
Hall, room 1049, begin a class session by reintroducing themselves to
each other, with names and home departments, an uninformed
observer might be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled into either a
social or a therapeutic event. It’s when the students go beyond name
and department and briefly describe the projects they’re working on
—“the influence of dialect on phoneme perception,” “the rise of fallen
women in mid-Victorian literature,” “eco-industrialism and the
Houston Ship Channel”—that the visitor clearly understands that the
gathering in question is in fact Honors 470, also known as the Rice
Undergraduate Scholars Program.
RUSP, as the program is
commonly and
affectionately known, is a
yearlong class in which
juniors and seniors from
all across the university
get to work on
sophisticated research
projects, the kinds of
projects that a generation
ago were restricted to
professors and graduate
students. Besides the investigations mentioned above, Rice undergrads have
done research into gender differences in spatial reasoning abilities (a gender
difference that doesn’t hold true for Rice students, according to the
student’s experiment), on the relationship between urban sprawl and air
quality in Houston, and on the snap judgments employers make when they
learn that a job-seeker is disabled.
Johnson
Kinsey
Pomerantz
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the research is not that it’s
performed by undergraduates, but that all these undergraduates present their
research not only to their faculty mentors but to each other. The young
“knot theory” mathematician has to present his research into DNA folding
in a way that the budding Victorian lit scholar has at least an outside chance
of grasping.
In other words, RUSP is the perhaps the ultimate Rice undergraduate
experience; it cuts across disciplines in a way that appeals to the
university’s many double- and triple-majors, and it challenges students who
love to work hard. “RUSP students are Rice students squared,” says Jim
Kinsey, the D.R. Bullard–Welch Foundation Professor of Science in the
chemistry department.
Kinsey, who is one of three faculty coordinators for the program, has been
active in RUSP since 1988, when he came to Rice as dean of natural
sciences. “RUSP was in its infancy,” according to Kinsey. RUSP had begun
a few years before as a result of a doomsday book and a Ford Foundation
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