The Contrast between Rice and the University of Houston

After my admission to the PhD program at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston, the electrical engineering faculty reviewed my coursework from Rice and recommended a couple of “remedial” courses for my first semester. Now, in the pecking order of colleges and universities, Rice was solidly top tier and the U of H not so much — so there may have been some intellectual rivalry bias built into their recommendation.

That could be a conclusion a suspicious person might draw. I may have flirted with that point of view for a moment, but I settled on a different conclusion pretty quickly. These professors were basing their recommendations less on institutional snobbery and more on a genuine difference in philosophy between the two engineering departments.

Rice leaned toward the theoretical; the U of H leaned toward the practical. At Rice, for example, I learned to prove that a certain circuit could be synthesized. At the U of H I learned how to actually build it.

Both Don Mauldin and I took the “remedial” circuit synthesis course our first semester of night school. We breezed through. Our Rice transcripts simply didn’t reflect the design and development work we had been doing at NASA.

A later example was a statistics course. I was focusing on a thesis topic in multivariate statistical analysis applied in the biomedical domain, and my advisor, J. D. Bargainer, pointed me toward a statistics course taught — of all places — in the business school. I took it and never regretted it.

The course was taught by a Dr. Brown, a rather older man with deep real-world statistical experience. Almost the entire course was devoted to validating that the correct statistical tool was being applied, based on the characteristics of the data at hand.

In another memory I’ll describe how this adventure ran its course.