This article is catered to individuals who would like to learn about resources available to them as undergraduates, especially those who share at least partial struggles with a “typical” first-generation or low-income student. This article outlines the resources I used and the challenges I faced as a first-generation, low-income (FLI) Rice Engineering student, along with the strategies I found helpful.

Table of Contents

  1. Who is speaking?
  2. TL;DR on FLI resources at Rice
  3. First-year stress points in career development
  4. Issues typically after first-year
  5. Advice for CS: Tech Recruiting & Ph.D.
  6. Closing remark and acknowledgments

First of all, who is speaking?

For context, I am a first-generation and low-income Asian American student who obtained a B.A. in Computer Science from Rice University. I have lived in a single-family household since high school junior year — my dad passed away from cancer. My bank account was at $1,000 at the start of college, a generous donation from my mom. I have a sister who was 8 years old when I started undergrad, and my mom does not speak English. I am an immigrant myself. To my knowledge, our household savings are less than the 4-year full cost of attendance at Rice sticker price.

Contrary to the above “disadvantages”, I spent 10 years in Hong Kong, where mathematical education is generally more rigorous than that of the US. The competition is also more fierce, akin to some high schools here. I was also fortunate to be placed in a public school system (FBISD) that regularly sends its top students to Ivy League schools. Moreover, I grew up in the Houston area, with regular support from my caring mother and a car at my disposal — a luxury that students coming from far away may not enjoy. Lastly, I am a US citizen, which qualifies me for certain funding available to domestic students. I am aware that many FLI students do not share these advantages.

TL;DR on FLI Resources at Rice

I believe that Rice is one of the best universities for supporting low-income students.

I have never paid out-of-pocket for anything I considered career development.

When in doubt, always contact the Office of Student Success Initiative. At the time of writing, their email is success@rice.edu.

In addition to formal school programs, my peers were very understanding and made low-income a status without shame. I don’t vouch for all things at Rice (as one wouldn’t for all organizations) but if you are debating about attending Rice due to a limited income background, I would not worry.

Below is a list of first-year questions I had:

What if things go wrong during move-in?

Talk to your O-Week advisors. On the rare occasion they are unhelpful, go to the O-Week Coord or another advisor. You’re bound to find one non-asshole and I urge you to take charge of this! I actually had my hard-lens contact stuck in my eyes on the first day of O-Week due to a deformed removal tool. I told my O-Week advisor and he went to 3 stores before Lunch to try and find a replacement. Ultimately, my mom drove to my optometrist and then to Rice because this stuff is specialized. However, his actions speaks to how much students value the Culture of Care.

Paying for Textbooks?

Submit a request at Access & Opportunity Portal. I probably got ~$1500 worth of stuff covered over my time total at Rice. If you need a physical text, you can check them out for a semester via AOP. Fondren Library offers digital copies and printing services on request. You can also find many open-sourced materials on Anna’s Archive.

Finding Cheap Room Decor?

Rice Students Selling Stuff FB page. Most useful for students moving off-campus, check during end-of-semesters.

Getting professional headshot & formal clothing?

The Rice CCD runs a photoshoot usually in September and they have a partnership with Dress for Success to get you stuff for interviews.

IDK what to major in!

Great question to approach multiple PAAs with (either at your home college or elsewhere). In my sophomore year, I also bugged a ton of friends at Brown to compile a 67-paged document with resources from every major at the time. Take the POVs with a grain of salt of course – there is not one way to finish a major. Generally, if you are considering an (ABET accredited) Engineering degree, you need to take Gen Chem and Physics in your 1st year. Other majors are typically doable in 3 (or maybe less with summer classes).

Struggling in classes?

Go to office hours hosted by professors/TAs and be bold(lol) on asking questions. Don’t ask for the answers (esp. for intro courses) because that will only support you in the short term. It is perfectly fine to ask for approaches or alternative explanations instead. Some awkward silences for you to think are also okay — in fact, I encourage you to ask for some time to think through it first if you need to! It may take going to a few different people to find the right one — the same logic applies to therapists.

Does Rice cover for health insurance?

Rice does not tell you whether it will cover your healths insurance ahead of Aetna enrollment. I qualified for a federal Pell Grant and the full amount of Rice investment, I got full coverage from Aetna by Rice for all 4 years. Make sure to email fina@rice.edu asking for the Allen Insurance Scholarship. Moreover, appointments at Rice Health Services (behind Brown College) are free — and they cover a lot of basic services for free/low charge. Their services are also irrespective of your insurance.

Should I go for external scholarship?

External scholarships go towards covering your out-of-pocket costs. If your tuition and housing costs are fully covered by Rice already, then Rice will deduct your external scholarship amount from their financial aid, effectively giving these students zero incentive for securing them. To my knowledge, the loopholes are (1) $2500-5000 can go to Federal Work-Study, and (2) $1000 can go towards a lifetime laptop budget. I would recommend always reporting your external scholarship to not risk losing the substantial Rice Investment amount. Cash rewards, such as winnings from writing competitions and Hackathons, do not count as scholarships and thus do not need to be reported.

Do you have extra financial tips??

  • Open a high-yield savings account, especially when you live off-campus. Dump your housing stipend in there and withdraw every month to pay rent, this earns you on average 2-5% interest which is higher than the 0.001% (or whatever) from basic accounts.
  • Uber Eats and GrubHub often give discounts after some period of pause on activity. Exam periods are usually a good time to cash in on the discounts
  • Amazon Prime offers a free 6-month trial per student email address. What is the limit of student alias emails you can make at Rice? Answer: more than 4 years worth of free Amazon Prime.

First-year stress points in career development

If finding a financially secure post-graduate plan is also at the top of your mind, here are some early milestones that were intimidating to me. Note again, some opinions may be more STEM-related.

Resume

You might have crafted a resume for college admission, but the expectations are slightly different when you are in college. A few pointers I have:

  • Every industry has a different standard. If you have a career direction in mind, look up Rice alums in that area via LinkedIn — you can find many example resumes typically.
  • Do NOT include your phone number or address on public resumes. You’re gonna get a bunch of scam calls.
  • Quantify your accomplishments when you can. You can’t magically quantify experiences that you never collected data for. As a first-year, it’s important to get in the mindset of thinking about how your experiences can be quantified to convey competence in a particular field. Below are example metrics for common underclassmen involvements:
    • If you TA’d: number of students you supported, homework graded, Piazza posts answered. Do be careful that you violate FERPA though — when in doubt, be careful or check with course instructors.
    • If you did outreach: the programs that your advisees went to, the number of people you helped, the number of peers you managed to deliver a piece of work.
    • If you did an internship: how many customers did your product impact, evaluation metrics before delivering a piece of work, etc.
  • If you start tracking data, you will find that you will be in a surprisingly good position by your Sophomore and Junior years.
  • List clubs under experience, esp. for project-based organizations like Rice Eclipse and Rice Apps. Write the organization name without the word “club” to avoid scrutiny from resume parsers. Also, diversified experience can be a strength. Many organizations are looking for generalists — a mixture of technical competence and the ability to collaborate, manage, and lead.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional social media platform. It is more relevant to folks entering the industry (as opposed to further education), but I recommend everyone to have a free LinkedIn profile in case their trajectory changes. In my first semester, I remember a comment from an upperclassman that stung me.

If you’re an Engineering student, you have to have a LinkedIn right? Everybody has it.

I was terrified about what to put on my LinkedIn.. well I had nothing but my high school GPA, a research “internship” where I was just putting glasses in a furnace, and the fact that I attend Rice now.

It’s fine if you are in this boat, just make an account + put what you can anyway.

Over time, you will realize that you have more things to add. Count the creation of the LinkedIn profile as a small win — I remember even finding a comfortable photo was a challenge. And if you hate LinkedIn because it is cringe, trust me I do too. I don’t like scrolling it or posting about little things, but I must admit that it is useful when you need to find an internship and stay in touch with folks from conferences. Just don’t install the app on your phone.

As for the benefits, I find LinkedIn most explicitly useful when I meet people at conferences — LinkedIn stood out as the most professional way to stay in touch. Affiliations can change, so recording email is less reliable. Implicitly, I suspect some recruiters have checked my LinkedIn page before giving me an interview.

I also observe that younger students often contact me through LinkedIn. So there is good you can do with the platform. If you are interested in sharing your experience with others, just also be aware that pooling multiple perspectives is important. So, I recommend suggesting other resources for the students you speak with to supplement your experiences.

If you still don’t vibe the idea of having a LinkedIn, many people do fine without it.

While I advocate for having an account and believe that it is beneficial to my career, I also know many friends without one who are happy and successful without the platform. Handshake and 12Twenty are also good alternatives to consider.

Internship

For the uninitiated (like myself once was), internships are temporary work experiences obtained during college. They can also be great cash flows, with some internships paying upwards of $30,000. From my observations, career success post-undergraduate is more positively correlated with internships than grades, which might be surprising to many. Logistically, internships often occur in summers between your semesters, and they are preceded by a recruiting season a couple of months ahead. Recruiting seasons are periods when organizations post their internship openings on their website, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or other job search platforms. For tech, recruiting season was traditionally in the fall before the internship summer. For consulting and investment banking, it might even happen a whopping year before.

  • My Credentials: You can see on my resume that I did research pretty much all of my time at Rice and after. Some people don’t consider research experience as an internship, and some aspects do differ. To support my advice in this section, I recruited in some capacity for all 4 years at Rice and received multiple internship and job offers. Some from industry, some from government, and some from non-profits. I had an offer from a prestigious big tech and an offer for an in-person internship in Norway. So, I did have some success with applying, though I ended up turning them down.

  • Now, my tips: Getting a first-year internship is hard, but it is a massive advantage if you pull it off. Friends with first-year internships usually obtain a prestigious role in subsequent summers. I firmly believe that there is a snowball effect. Oftentimes, organizations host programs targeted directly at underclassmen from minority groups. For example, here is a list of tech internships maintained by Harvard, and another for consulting. If applicable to your field, research either at Rice or with an external program (e.g. NSF REU) can be more accessible. SURF is the Rice flagship program. NSF maintains a REU search repository. Sign up for departmental mailing lists (typically by declaring major/minor) to be up-to-date on opportunities.

  • And if you didn’t secure a first-year internship: First of all, I believe this is the common case. I know many peers (including some FLIs) who springboarded from undergrad research and no-name companies to prestigious roles by their sophomore summer. As long as you do something that produces quantifiable bullet points on your resume, you are on a good trajectory. You can often do personal projects to compensate for formal training, such as technical writing in the humanities or software projects in computer science. Explore the full depth of what’s available!

Issues typically after first-year

You spend your first few months at Rice at least, and you kind of know who to go to for formal guidance. But, some questions feel less appropriate for Rice staff. Instead, you may seek perspective from a peer.

Going off-campus, should I get a meal plan?

You can get a surprisingly high amount of meal swipes from the donation program, especially now that they increased the donation limit. I got 50 swipes in my senior spring, which was more than enough to support the few campus meals I got. Usually, I ate at home or off-campus. If you can regularly cook/meal prep and are on the fence, I would suggest going without. If you find housing prices on par or lower than Rice’s rent, I strongly believe that you can cover healthy eating with the meal swipe donations + the occasional meal off-campus. Do allocate your budget for food ahead of time so you don’t skip meals.

Traveling for a conference or internship, can I get funded?

Many Rice organizations have funds available to help with your travel or relocation. The big two are CCD and SSI, but SAPP can help with clubs and your home department might have grants too. I got ~$1000 for flight tickets and grocery charges in my junior summer for attending a mathematics REU program in NYC (yea.. this one didn’t pay enough and was reimbursed after). You can usually make a strong case for programs with delayed reimbursements.

Many of my peers always go on vacation. Everyone is in Japan this summer. How can I experience that too?

First of all, I believe that traveling experiences are great financial investments. It truly gives you convenient conversation points to network (ahem) with peers organically, which can sprout into long-lasting friendships, strong referrals, and collaborations if you end up pursuing research. It also broadens your perspective on how life can look like.

This section purposefully combines professional and personal goals for traveling, because I believe professional travels are incredible opportunities for personal growth for FLI students. In my experience, there are tremendous financial benefits to combining the two — and a lot of people do it, despite the lack of transparency out of professional concerns.

One of my biggest achievements in undergrad is how many places I explored on professional funding. As someone who has been in Houston since immigrating and never went on a family vacation due to limited financial means, I dreamt of visiting major cities like San Francisco and New York and going abroad to Europe and Asia. Spoilers alert: I did all of that. Some tips to get free (or low-cost) travel:

  • Apply to internships and research programs in places you want to visit.
  • Rice Externships can fund travel stipends.
  • Search for fellowships with international travel (e.g. Rice CCL). Personally, I applied to a CS summer school at Germany’s Max Planck Institute.
  • Pack vacations with funded travel: Most programs provide 2 one-way tickets (for roundtrip), but you may be able to squeeze in a short vacation by self-paying one ticket.
  • Order tickets (flight AND train, if applicable) early. For international trips, VPN to another country and booking directly from their country’s airline’s website can sometimes yield cheaper prices than booking from a US IP address or US website.
  • Find opportunities for personal growth in between professional activities! The need to rest and recharge to avoid burnout is doubly true for professional travels — where you may feel obligated to socialize with strangers at a much higher frequency. Practical planning advice: 2 activities per day, know the safe areas, and budget.

Advice for CS: Tech Recruiting & Ph.D.

Here is advice for folks pursuing a similar trajectory as I have in undergrad. First, there’s a wiki made by more senior students. It remains pretty relevant IMHO.

Tech Recruiting (e.g. Software Engineering, Product Management)

  • Personal Projects: Tech recruiting is unique in that personal projects mean a lot. Great projects (well-used, well-explained) may even compensate for the lack of formal experience. Here is a piece listing some ideas to start with. Some folks land interviews with resumes containing just their class projects (or some marginally extended variant) from COMP 140 and COMP 182. More original projects are often viewed preferably. I struggled with coming up with an original idea, so I tagged along on teams such as RiceApps and Google Summer of Code. In particular, RiceApps runs an Open Source Accelerator (OSA) every summer to teach students web development. Sometimes, they admit pre-freshmen too. If you lean data science, you can also reproduce a notebook on Kaggle, which hosts a ton of datasets and machine learning (ML) competitions. Some practical tips for building a project:
    • Open your terminal. Make a folder dedicated to projects by running mkdir projects and change into that directory with cd projects. Do ALL of your development stuff there so you don’t clutter your computer unnecessarily. Ask ChatGPT to explain this step in detail if it confuses you (which is okay, but there’s just a ton of intricacy to terminal commands that I don’t want to dive into here).
    • Start your project on Github and regularly commit (save your progress). GitHub is the most popular hub for open-sourced development, which means that people can see the source code of your project. The necessary basics are here.
    • Sign up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack with your school email, which contains many free software services such as Co-Pilot (AI code assistant), MongoDB (for data storage), and JetBrains (fancy code editors).
    • Follow some YouTube tutorials at first.
    • Different from a well-scoped class syllabus, it is nearly impossible to know everything about programming. You will realize that there are like 100’s of advanced terminal commands, Github workflows, libraries out there. My advice is to focus on one small problem for your project (e.g. making a custom Diary app) and only read the necessary information to execute it. In practice, this means that you should know the git add, git commit , and git push commands. But, you should ignore the reading on git fetch when you just start. Trust me, you will get better over time!!
  • Coding Interview Prep: A major component of the tech internship process is coding interviews, which are algorithm brainteaser questions. Examples questions can be found on Leetcode, which is the most popular platform for practicing these interview questions. Many sources recommend Cracking the Coding Interview, a really thick book. I personally think it is way too long to get through with all 9,000 other things that you have to get done during recruiting season. Instead, I recommend studying the 14 Leetcode Patterns and sampling a few problems in Blind 75. In terms of how the sampling should be done, a friend once recommended this strategy: for refreshers or topics you used in class, do 1-3 easy’s and 1-2 medium’s. For concept that you have trouble implementing (e.g. heap questions), do a majority of the problems and make notes. At Rice, the COMP 140, COMP 182, and COMP 215 sequence prepares you well for these interviews. Less is more. Train you ability to detect the pattern, group problems. Don’t treat every problem as an isolated instance — otherwise it can be hugely overwhelming. It’s a fine strategy to prioritize coding interview prep in freshmen summer (or summers in general).
  • Applying: Mass apply. Use an automatic application filler like Simplify. Find a list of companies such as from Levels.fyi. Pittsburgh Computer Science Club also maintains a list every year on Github. Commit short amount of time per day to just send out resumes. For me, 5-10 minutes was good for getting over 100 applications out without feeling burnout.

Research, Graduate School (Ph.D.)

First of all, if you are at all interested in machine learning research, check out this post. Secondly, you don’t need a Master’s before applying to a PhD program in CS (and many adjacent fields). Thirdly, don’t go to an unfunded PhD program — you should always expect a living stipend. Fourth, a PhD is more like a job than being an undergraduate student. Lastly, the people you work with and life outside of work matters.

Onto specific tips entering graduate school season.

  • Request an application fee waiver (or at least know how it works) by November. It’s different at every school, and some may take days to process (looking at you, UT Austin ECE).
  • Alex Lang’s NSF material repository. Useful for finding examples of research proposal too.
  • Research output is important, but don’t get discouraged without a publication. Your narrative, passions, knowledge on the field, and intuition are considered too. Knowing professors from conferences or emails ahead of application season can be really helpful.
  • How to prep for Grad School if you’re poor
  • Many schools run graduate application assistance programs, e.g. MIT EECS GAAP.
  • Graduate school admission happens in rounds, and not everyone apply out of undergrad (in fact, this is probably less common across the board). Some folks at my PhD school (MIT) applied in multiple cycles. Some took time off to work in industry, while others found research assistant roles to craft a stronger application and learn more about their own interests. The journey can take multiple forms.
  • Talk to current graduate students at the labs you plan to apply to. Learn about the pros/cons of their advisors. Sometimes, it takes talking to multiple students to learn about the red flags. Here is a good list of questions.

Closing Remarks

This piece aims to share my advice to help bridge the gap between FLI students and our more prepared peers. My challenges were mostly in navigating college norms, financial resources, and recruiting culture for high-earning, prestigious careers. Thus, I aim to help FLI students identify campus resources and compete for lucrative career roles. Throughout my time at Rice though, short-term financial gains gradually lowered in priority. The origin of this shift in priority comes from fruitful discussions over The Death of Ivan Ilyich in FWIS 100, led by Prof. Burke Nixon. My present belief is that my (and my family’s) financial needs are moderate enough to allow me to pursue a PhD, which is mostly fueled by my passion for mathematics and desire to create positive social impact.

If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please send me an email!

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rice FLI alums Brian Serrata, Channing Wang, and Gabrielle (Gabby) Franklin for their helpful feedbacks on this piece. In particular, Brian suggested a more thorough section on internships and recruiting. Channing highlighted many Rice official resources that I was not aware of. Gabby provided feedback to enhance the overall inclusivity of this piece, informed by her former role as President of the Rice Student Association.

I also owe many for helping me through my first year at Rice. Firstly, my own O-Week advisors: Bria Weisz, Hachem Bey, Ray Zou, Roma Nayyar. I want to also thank Jason Gardner, Cole Morgan, Melinda Ding, Cameron Diao, Zach Rewolinski, Eliot Solomon, Wei-Lin Hsiao, Prof. Burke Nixon, Prof. Rudy Guerra, Prof. Luay Nakhleh, and my magisters B.J. & Shirley Fregly.