Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Winter 2002

Taking the Honors
academic life too.
“They usually wind up with a lot of tears,” Pomerantz says. “People don’t
know how hard it is to do a project. So they learn patience, tolerance, and
how hard you have to work to make something good happen.”
There is a final important component to the RUSP experience. Through
monies made available by the provost’s office, students receive small
grants that are usually spent on travel. Most student trips are made to attend
professional conferences. But last year, Leslie Contreras, then a junior in
the English department, used her $1,600 grant to go England for a week
over winter break.
Mentored by Professor Helena
Michie, Contreras was doing research
into Victorian gender roles as
expressed in novels by the Brontë
sisters and by George Sand. Michie
had once commented in class that, in
certain Victorian novels, the young
and often unruly female protagonist
will disappear from the story for a
time before returning either as the
embodiment of young Victorian
womanhood or as a nonconforming
woman who is doomed to failure.
Contreras became very interested in
this off-stage transformation process
Leslie Contreras
and what it said about Victorian views
of a woman’s role. She approached Michie about doing research into the
subject and decided that RUSP offered the ideal structure for such a
complicated and time-consuming investigation.
She went to England with a letter of introduction from Michie—another
trick of academic life well learned—and with it was able to gain entrance to
rare book collections at Oxford that even Oxford undergraduates seldom
enter. There she found period conduct manuals for girls that clearly spelled
out what Contreras calls the “Victorian view of maturation.”
She also learned her own hard lessons about research. There’s never
enough time, and it might take you a whole day to find a single relevant
page.
The RUSP grant also greatly broadened her horizons. “I’d never been out
of Texas before,” says Contreras, a native Houstonian. “My parents were
very worried.”
After Contreras returned and finished her paper, she realized that she’d
gotten the research bug. “The experience made me want to continue,” she
says, then she lists the graduate schools she’s applying to. She hopes for a
career in academia.
In the meantime, RUSP coordinators Pomerantz, Kinsey, and Johnson look
on their students with delight—and a little envy. “When I was an
undergrad,” Pomerantz says, “we got a 10-minute presentation on academic
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