Orientation Week Faculty address

Orientation
Week Faculty Address
…………………………………………………………………

By Mikki Hebl
The Radaslov Tsanoff
Assistant Professor of Psychology

It is my sincere
privilege to welcome you, new students, to Rice University,
Houston, Texas. I welcome each of you, each of the 672 first-
year students and the 56 transfer students that are seated
in front of, around and behind me! I truly believe that
you comprise some of the luckiest people in the world. Yes,
in the world. And I congratulate you, I applaud you, and
I welcome you.

Although I know
that you come in 728 different flavors, with 728 different
backgrounds, there are consistent themes to the feelings
and emotions that most of you are currently experiencing.

First, most of
you probably are feeling the depths of excitement —
excitement about finally arriving to the college that you
chose! About breathing in the beauty of the campus. Feeling
the absolute wealth of opportunities that await you here.
Excitement about the wonderfully bright and witty friends
that you will meet. About finally being liberated from your
parents. Or perhaps the excitement is in smaller doses …
I know mine would be that the dining halls have ice cream
available at every meal!

Second, most
of you probably feel some level of sadness — of leaving
your friends and … well … I’m assuming that
a great number of you actually really like your parents
… I know I did. For many of you, this may be your first
extended period away from home. If you don’t feel this
sadness right away, it might hit you when you have to do
your own laundry. I almost guarantee that at least one of
you will experience this sadness when you are trying to
save money and you decide to chunk all of your dirty clothes
into one washload … you mix some sort of red shirt
with your whites … and voilà! Your wardrobe
becomes pink. E-mail me when that happens. It will truly
make you miss home!

And third, most
of you probably feel the depths of anxiety and overwhelm
— sweating in the heat like you have never ever before
experienced and wondering if this “Texas college thing”
was really such a good idea; meeting your roommate and hoping
beyond belief that you got lucky and have a good one; worrying
because you feel like a klutz in your first week of athletic
practice; and worrying that you might be the “admissions
mistake” — that you really don’t deserve
to be here and that you might not be as smart as everyone
else. I can assure each of you that the admissions staff
carefully selected you and that each one of you deserves
to be here and will thrive if you put to use the wonderful
intellect and personality characteristics that got you here.

So these mixed
emotions may feel stressful … and indeed psychologists
have indicated that one of the most stressful things that
people experience in life (right up there with bereavement,
divorce and war) is moving. And it’s because it evokes
so many mixed emotions — both eustress (the positive
stuff) and distress (the negative kind). But either way,
it’s stress … and as you experience it in the
first few weeks, recognize it and take comfort in the fact
that it will subside in its intensity. You will make it,
you can do it, and you should be here!

As a part of
this stress, yesterday, today and for the rest of the orientation
week, you are going to be inundated with information about
your residential college, about safety and security, about
athletics, about drugs and alcohol, about diversity and
about Rice University in general. Hold onto your hats and
try to take in as much as you possibly can — your college
education will be a far more easy transition if you are
able to digest as much of this helpful information as possible.

Now, my personal
role in your weeklong orientation to Rice University is
to represent the faculty in welcoming you. And I am a faculty
member of the psychology department, and I thought I would
start out by describing my own field to you. When you hear
that I am a psychology professor, you probably assume that
I am a clinical psychologist and that I do therapy and counseling.
The rest of the general population certainly assumes this,
and you can imagine the interesting plane rides that I have
when the stranger next to me asks what I do. I tell them
I teach psychology, and they immediately begin to disclose
to me details of their dysfunctional family. When I insist
that “I am not that sort of psychologist,” they
refuse to believe me and continue disclosing a deluge of
deeply disturbing facts about their brothers, their sisters,
their pets and their completely bizarre behaviors.

Instead, I was
trained in a type of psychology called social psychology,
and I refer to myself as an applied social psychologist.
Social psychology is the study of the way people think about,
influence and interact with each other. And if I could suddenly
make you all experts in social psychology, you would realize
that it is so extremely relevant to being a freshman and
to entering a new environment such as college. Because social
psychologists study all sorts of topics that will affect
your lives.

For instance,
social psychologists study friendship formation. In a clever
study, well-known researcher Leon Festinger examined whether
the location of people’s living space could influence
the size of their friendship networks. So, could the location
of your dorm room influence the number of friends that you
develop? By examining the students at MIT and their housing
complex, he found that those living closest to the stairs
and those living close to the bathroom were more likely
to have greater friendship networks than those living at
the end of the hall. The reason for this finding was that
rooms by the stairs and bathrooms were the ones that were
most frequently passed by — they were in highly traversed
locations, so occupants of these rooms would be seen more
often; they would learn people’s names more quickly;
others would stop by for a minute or two on their way to
and from the bathroom or stairs. And so, this effect, called
“the mere exposure” effect, reveals more generally
that we tend to like people or things the more that we are
exposed to them. This effect will partially explain why
many of you will have the greatest number of friends within
your residential college or within your classes … you
have the greatest amount of exposure to them.

Now for those
of you living at the end of the halls, do not despair! Not
only might you have peace and quiet at your disposal, but
other psychology researchers have found that being forewarned
is being forearmed and that many research psychology findings
can be undone if people simply learn about their results!
And this notion — that being forewarned is being forearmed
— is the underlying theme of my address today.

Social psychologists
also study attraction and relationships. For instance, whom
do you think you will date while you are at Rice? What sort
of values will he or she hold? And, of course, will he or
she be attractive? Research by two social psychologists,
Hatfield and Bersheid, found that people not only date individuals
who are similar in attitudes and values, but they also found
evidence for what they refer to as the “matching hypothesis”
of attractiveness. People tend to date others who match
them in terms of attractiveness. So, for instance, say I
ask you to tell me on a scale from one to 10 how attractive
you are.

Please think
of that number … where are you on a scale from one
to 10? Chances are that you will rate the person that you
date to be very close to that same number. So, if you are
a six, your relationship partner will likely be around a
six. Now, obviously there are stark exceptions to this phenomenon.
We often see supermodels dating some pretty ugly-looking
dudes, but in general, this phenomenon holds and, in fact,
we even observe many couples who actually look like they
could be siblings.

Social psychologists
also study the power of social norms and conformity. Over
the next few days and certainly over the course of this
first semester, each of you will probably find yourself
in some situations in which you stick out like a sore thumb,
in which you do something, wear something, say something
that you wish you hadn’t. As a result, many of you
will probably feel a desire to “get back in line”
— to fit in with others around you. Social psychologists
study why it is that some of you will and some of you will
not adhere to more serious conformity challenges. For instance,
many of you may change your hairstyle and the way in which
you dress in the first few weeks to better adjust to the
social norms that you observe at Rice. Some of you might
try to better fit in to the Rice social scene by attempting
to lose weight in very dangerous ways or begin social drinking
and smoking in excessive ways that may have repercussions
for the rest of your lives.

Social psychologists
studying issues of persuasion and conformity have found
that the power of social norms and peer groups is enormous.
Social norms and conformity can be good — at the most
basic level, they instill societal order. We wear clothes
and particular types of clothes for particular occasions
(e.g., we don’t go to the beach in our prom dresses),
we stand in line for things, we rotate listening with speaking
in conversations. But social norms can also be bad. They
lead us to do things that we wouldn’t normally do and/or
are truly self-destructive. Researchers have found that
the implications of such pressures can be accentuated by
a process called “cognitive dissonance,” in which
people strategically replace inconsistent cognitions and
behaviors with consistent ones. Let me give you an example.

Consider that
some of you will begin to smoke while you are in college
because it is part of some social scenes. Now, smoking causes
cancer, right? It literally, inarguably takes years off
of most people’s lives. So when faced with this knowledge,
what does the person who begins to smoke think? Do they
think smoking is bad? If they did, it would be inconsistent
with their behavior.

Leon Festinger
(yes, the same social psychologist who did the MIT housing
study) found that such people face “cognitive dissonance”
— a feeling of discomfort that results when cognitions
and behaviors are not in line with each other. People strive
to be consistent. So people respond to cognitive dissonance
by reducing the inconsistencies. For instance, smokers might
change the inconsistent behavior. They might simply quit
smoking — then their cognition (smoking is bad) and
their behavior (they don’t smoke) are in line again.
Or, they might also change the cognition. They might think
that smoking is indeed bad but it doesn’t affect everyone
— they will think of lots of old people they know who
smoke and are still alive or they will justify that “it
isn’t bad if you smoke low-tar” or “it isn’t
bad if you just smoke in social situations.” And I
think you can see how social norms and conformity can use
cognitive dissonance as a tool for believing that a particular
set of unhealthy behaviors may be a worthwhile pursuit.
Please be forewarned about these psychological mechanisms
when you make your behavioral choices!

And the last
example that I will give is that social psychologists also
study helping behavior. Undoubtedly during your time at
Rice you will see someone who needs your help. Maybe it
will be someone who is choking in the dining hall (I’m
not saying that the quality of food in the dining halls
is bad, but perhaps because they have eaten too quickly)
or maybe it will be someone who is yelling at another person
or crying out from behind a closed dormitory room. Researchers
have found that people are sometimes very unlikely to help
others. Is this because we don’t care? Psychologists
were spurred to ask this question when a terrible incident
happened in New York City some 20 years ago. A young woman
named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death while 38 people
watched from the windows of their apartment buildings. Not
a single one of the 38 people called the police. Social
psychologists Darley and Latane discovered that a number
of factors led to people’s unwillingness to help. First,
people assumed that someone else had called the police.
Second, people were afraid that they would personally be
injured. And, third, people didn’t want to intrude
upon what might have been a lovers’ quarrel. Darley
and Latane contrived a number of situations, and they and
other researchers found that people were also less likely
to help if they were in larger groups of people, if they
could remain hidden and if there was any ambiguity of the
situation. Imagine the embarrassment you might feel, for
instance, if you slammed in a door where people were yelling
and you found that they were only rehearsing lines for a
theater performance or the yelling was actually coming from
a television set. Or imagine if you jumped into action in
the dining hall and ran over to the seemingly choking individual,
only to find out that they he or she was just imitating
someone choking. Given that I just discussed conformity
and our desire to avoid sticking out like a sore thumb,
one might be motivated to just altogether avoid helping.

And I tell you
this example, because again, the best source of getting
beyond conformity and of getting beyond bystander intervention
is to learn about the effect and the findings. Again, remember
that being forewarned is being forearmed!

Okay, you might
be able to discern that I love the field in which I was
trained and I am so pleased to share some of it with you
— general findings on friendship formation, on attraction
and relationships, on conformity, on cognitive dissonance
and on helping behaviors.

However, some
of you will never even set foot into a psychology class.
And I certainly want to offer to you something other than
a very general look at a few social psychological findings.

So, I reflected
back to my own college experience. And I want to tell you
about the challenges that I personally faced as well as
the benefits I reaped. Specifically, I want to tell you
what college meant to me and what I truly hope it means
to you.

First, for me,
college enabled perspective taking, or the ability to truly
step outside of myself and take on someone else’s perspective,
fully untainted by the biases of my own background. Said
another way, the reality I have about any given situation
may very well be a different reality than you might have
about the same situation, and one is not necessarily better
than another. There are these pictorial illusions called
“bistable cognitive representations” — some
of you may have seen them. If you look at a picture one
way, it looks like an old lady, and if you look at it another
way you see a very young woman. Oftentimes people can only
see one of the images. But one is no more accurate or real
than the other.

And this ability
to take different perspectives was cultivated on the first
day that I arrived at college. I was from a small town in
the Midwest called Pardeeville, Wisconsin. Yes, you can
imagine the laughs I have had my whole life as a result
of being from Pardeeville. My roommate was from … well,
New York. Although I came from a relatively small family
(one brother and one sister), my father was one of 17 children
(yes, 17; yes, from the same two people; and yes, Catholic).
And as a result, I developed a big-family mentality …
sharing, humility and a focus on others. My roommate was
an only child. On my side of the room were all the photographs
of the friends I had left behind, of my dog, of my family.
On her side of the room were photographs of her alone in
her proudest life moments. I was into sports and hoping
she would be someone who could be my soulmate during our
jogging sessions in which I thought we would find solace,
attempting to simultaneously help each other reach that
elusive goal of losing 10 pounds. She never exercised, weighed
under 100 pounds, and was into singing. I was tone-deaf.
I would often come home and find her watching my television
and listening to my stereo, although I was not able to use
her computer.

This seemingly
horrible mismatch was nothing short of a true, sincere delight.

I came to adore my very, very different roommate. I lovingly
called her “Ninkinin” — her family nickname.
We often shut ourselves up in that dorm room learning how
to juggle, talking until wee hours of the night or until
one of us would fall asleep listening to the other, swapping
tutorials on sports heroes and worthwhile composers, or
just peacefully doing our homework in the company of each
other until we couldn’t take it any longer and would
break out into laughter about something. I learned so much
from her and began to meld with her in some ways and remain
apart from her in others. Gosh, I feel lucky to have lived
with Ninkinin that first year. And may some of you be lucky
enough to live with someone who is very different from you.

My roommate initiated
in me the important life lesson that rather than try to
make everyone see and agree with my own particular point
of view, I should try to understand other people’s
varying ideologies and framing of a particular situation.

Second, and
very similarly, college fostered an appreciation for diversity
more generally. Not only was I able to appreciate the very
different background that my roommate had, but I was also
able to appreciate people on the basis of varying race,
religion, sexual orientation and political beliefs.

Variations in
such characteristics were simply not something I had encountered
growing up in a very small, sheltered, almost 100 percent
white Midwestern town. But these characteristics were deeply
embedded and a large part of my college experience. Diversity
was everywhere. Diversity of race and ethnicity, of religions,
of sexual orientations, of financial backgrounds and in
politics. Rice University is also a wonderfully diverse
place. Please immerse yourselves in its variance, step outside
of your own perspective and comfort level and challenge
yourself to think and take on others’ perspectives.

I am certain
that the diverse world that college exposed me to cultivated
my decision to attend graduate school and formally study
gender issues and the topic of diversity and discrimination.

Third, college
enables a “coming of age” and a sense of empowerment
and autonomy.

I remember on
our way out to college, my mom cried a good portion of the
1,300 miles that my parents and I drove from my home in
Wisconsin to my new college dormitory in Massachusetts.
And when the time came for them to leave, I was waving happily,
and as they drove around that corner to head back home,
I realized that things were suddenly beyond my control …
they were going home and I was not. I sat down in front
of my dorm and bawled my eyes out! I felt the sadness, but
moreover, I was awakened to the autonomy … how would
I spend the rest of the day? What did I want to do?

There is this
quote by Bob Seger that always takes me back to that exact
feeling I had on my first day at college. Bob Seger, if
you don’t know, is the guy who sings the Chevy commercial
song “Like A Rock” and the popular song “Old
Time Rock n’ Roll.” Anyhow, there is this lyric
in the song “Roll Me Away” found on his greatest
hits album. It goes like this (keep in mind, I’m tone
deaf and the people who built the Shepherd School are going
to be most unhappy):

“Standing
on a mountaintop, looking out at the great divide. I could
go east, I could go west; it was all up to me to decide.”

And college,
to me, represented this. A true “coming of age”
in which you begin to make your decisions independent of
your parents and independent of your peer group. Very shortly
you will decide on your classes and they will no longer
be “what everyone else is taking.” Soon after,
you will also need to decide on a major, and you will choose
a pathway while your friends and other classmates choose
others. And in these decisions, you will begin to feel your
autonomy! And you will also probably feel a resurgence of
the adolescent identity crisis when you try to come to terms
with what you want to spend your time in college doing and
what sort of studies and career you would like to pursue.
It is a time to look inward, not outward, and yet this must
be done at the same time that there is a lot of pressure
to fit in. Make sure you take the time … think about
your passions, what inspires you and follow your heart.

If you, instead,
spend your time studying what someone else wants you to
study or follow someone else’s path, you are only delaying
your own personal “coming of age” process. Just
remember to look inward as much as possible and be true
to yourself.
Fourth, college inspires a love of learning.

It seemed like
the more I learned, the more I realized I didn’t know
and the more I wanted to know! But oh, the things that I
learned in college! From mutations of the drosophila fruit
fly to the fact that one mole plus one mole equaled …
well … one mole.

From amophila
brevalagada (Latin name for sea grass) to conditioning rats
to push levers for food pellets. I loved it all and am sure
that this love of learning is one of the reasons I permanently
refused to leave the college campus.

Challenge yourself
to take classes in areas that you might know nothing about.
Strengthen your weaknesses. Explore new fields of study.
Discover what you are good at. Discover what interests you
and, again, what you are passionate about!

As the father
of psychology William James said: “Seek out that particular
mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally
alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says,
‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found
that attitude, follow it.”

During your
four years at Rice, you will read like you have never before
read, you will take some of the most difficult tests you
have yet taken, and you will need to cram tons of complex
information into your brain.

While it will
seem like work, never lose sight of the fact that your education
is a great privilege. A great privilege! You may feel, at
times, like you cannot wait to get out of college, but I
guarantee that once college is over, you will wish beyond
belief that you were back in it! So savor your education.
Each of you is holding a valuable spot at Rice University.
Appreciate it, and take advantage of it by learning as much
as you possibly can and by making books, intellect and learning
your friends for life.

Fifth and finally,
college allows you to establish lifelong friends. There
are times when I am alone and I can still laugh out loud,
recalling some of my favorite college memories.

Gosh, how we
laughed, how we learned together, and how we bonded. After
college, I traveled to England with one of my friends, I
ran a marathon with another, I opened my house to a classmate
who was in distress for four months, I myself relied on
still a fourth friend to help me move from Dartmouth College
(where I got my Ph.D.) down to Rice, I recruited five friends
during my five-year college reunion week to participate
in my dissertation study (suckers!), and I was in four classmates’
weddings. I also consider some of my college professors
to be lifelong friends. Just last year, one of my professors
came down to Houston and spent a few days with me before
we headed off together to attend a research conference.

One of the ways
to ensure yourself of having good friends is to be involved.
Get out and join some clubs, try new things, meet lots of
different people across lots of different contexts. I was
on the softball team, and the bus rides to and from games
were perhaps the single best memory I have of college. My
friendships with those softball teammates are still rock
solid.

I hope that
you let all five of these elements that I described be part
of your experience — that you learn to take others’
perspectives, that you appreciate diversity, that you embrace
your own “coming of age” experience, that you
are inspired to love learning and that you establish lifelong
friends.

Let me tell
you, Class of 2005, that all of these elements are possible
at Rice University.
To fully appreciate the uniqueness of Rice University:
• Make sure to make a habit of walking or jogging the
three-mile lap of Rice, amongst the tree-lined Live Oaks
— what breathtaking, beautiful trees.
• Appreciate the other green space on campus, particularly
given the fact that Rice is located in the middle of a booming
metropolis. Use it to play a pickup game of ultimate Frisbee
or soccer or more leisurely having conversations with friends.
• Marvel at the architecture — the gargoyles,
the marble and the emblems of Rice all beautifully preserved
in the quadrangle buildings.
• Visit the collections found in the deep recesses
of the library, including the complete works of Julian Huxley,
student scrapbooks dating back to 1912 and women’s
dance cards.
• Take in a baseball game at Reckling Park, one of
the finest college baseball parks in the country, and realize
that you are probably watching players who will make the
big league.
• Spend time talking with your professors outside of
the classroom, in the residential colleges, over lunch or
at dinner.
• Attend a performance at the Shepherd School of Music
and be awed not only by the voices, but also by the acoustics,
the concert halls and one of the largest pipe organs in
the country!
• Watch the spirit of the nonconforming MOB as they
perform at the sports events.
• Participate in one of the college musicals or plays.
• Be a spectator at athletic competitions. Admire the
fact that some of our women swimmers made the Olympic trials,
that some of our runners have won Nationals, that our women’s
basketball team made it to the second round of NCAA finals
two years ago and that our baseball team is consistently
ranked in the top 10.
• Take time to look at the azaleas — the deep
purple that line portions of the campus in the spring.
• Make sure to not only explore Rice from corner to
corner, but to also get to know the city of Houston.
• And, of course, at least once during your four years
here, scare the bejeezus out of past poor unsuspecting faculty
members who just happen to be in the library by running
naked with shaving cream all over your body on the 13th
day of the month. If you haven’t heard about this tradition,
I trust you will in the next few days.

In a book called
“Colleges that Change Lives” the author Loren
Pope wrote that colleges that tend to change people’s
lives have two essential features: 1)“a familial sense
of communal enterprise that gets students heavily involved
in cooperative rather than competitive learning”; and
2) “a faculty of scholars devoted to helping young
people develop their powers … mentors who often become
their valued friends.”

Without a doubt,
Rice University is a college that changes lives!

And the faculty
at Rice are a big part of this. Please take the time to
get to know some of us.
• Maybe you will join the ranks of the students who
spend the entire night camping out in front of Dennis Huston’s
office, just trying to enroll in his speech class.
• Or discover how engaging and accessible John Hutchinson
in the chemistry department is.
• Watch Nia Georges bring anthropology to life.
• Consider taking Joel Wolfe’s renowned “History
of Baseball” class.
• Or realize that statistics can actually be fun, especially
when taught by Mickey Quiñones in the psychology
department, who is the master of Baker.
• Or consider becoming a sociology major because the
professors in this department (Chandler Davidson, Bill Martin,
Elizabeth Long, Steve Klineberg, Michael Emerson, Katherine
Donato and others) comprise some of my favorite professors
and some of my favorite human beings on this campus!
• Or feel the passion that Michel Achard in the French
and linguistics departments ignites inside and outside of
the classroom.

These are just
a few of the beloved and talented faculty that will be educating
you over the next four years. They and the rest of the faculty
are among the best in the country — look at their credentials,
look at their aspirations, look at their workload, and look
at their achievements! These faculty who teach your classes
will also be those with whom some of you will conduct research,
with whom you may eat a meal or share a conversation, and
with whom you may develop a lifelong friendship.

As a faculty,
we are passionate about our subject matter and we welcome
sharing our passions with you. We look forward to training
you to be passionate, confident, creative, committed and
competent scholars!

It is important
to note, though, that your college education is not a one-way
street. Rather, it is a busy, busy street in which you will
learn from many different sources … the faculty, the
staff and administration, graduate students, upperclassmen,
classmates, the people down the hall, your O-Week group
and your roommate. And just as you will be learning from
all of these sources, you will also be teaching them as
well. Do not underestimate how much of your college education
will come from the learning that you do outside the classroom.

Maximize this
by becoming an active member of the Rice University community
and opening up as many of these channels as you can. That
is, make your street a busy one at Rice!

In conclusion,
I want to return to a theme in my address, and that is the
notion that“being forewarned is being forearmed. Lying
before you are four years of great opportunities and a campus
full of resources. I have shared with you what were important
discoveries in my own educational odyssey to help “forearm”
you. Evaluate carefully whether or not you want to conform,
learn to take others’ perspectives, appreciate diversity,
embrace your own “coming of age” experience, be
inspired to love learning and establish lifelong friends.

And with that,
I again welcome you, students, to the beginning of your
own personal journey through Rice University!