A full-time director of Leadership Rice, Rebecca Stern, joined the program at the beginning of July. Leadership Rice was conceived as a program to help Rice undergraduates develop their skills in order to more effectively generate and manage positive change in today's world. One purpose of the program is to provide students with a heightened awareness of the critical local and national issues that contemporary leaders encounter daily. Students learn through classroom lectures, discussions and internships with mentors from the worlds of government, business and nonprofit organizations. The program is divided into three parts to allow for both academic and practical experiences over the course of a full year.
Students spend two semesters in the classroom and work as interns during the summer.
Since its inception, Leadership Rice has enjoyed a groundswell of support from the Houston corporate and nonprofit communities. Major gifts have been received from Hershel and Hilda Rich, and Compaq Computer Corp., with generous support from Houston International Protocol Alliance, Young Audiences of Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, and more than a dozen other individual and corporate sponsors. As the program becomes better known, it is hoped that internship opportunities will multiply and that community support for Leadership Rice will continue to expand throughout Houston and beyond. Leadership Rice stands foursquare in the long-standing tradition at Rice of preparing students for a life of community service. We have been very pleased indeed with the results of this program so far and see a bright future for it in the years ahead.