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January 12, 2007 > News > News in Brief

News in Brief

By The Rice Thresher Editorial Staff | Thresher Editorial Staff

Cingular outage causes distress for students

Rice students lived Generation Y’s worst nightmare last weekend. Cingular Wireless customers returning to campus Saturday and Sunday experienced problems contacting friends and calling back home. Students had trouble finding strong frequencies and reported dropped calls and calls skipping to voicemail.

Baker College senior D’yon Peoples said she had trouble reaching friends and family.

“It really interfered with phone calls because so many people in Houston have Cingular,” Peoples said. “It was hard to reach my parents.”

The Rice Information Technology Help Desk sent out an announcement last Friday about the issue, saying that Cingular hoped to have the network patched before Jan. 6.

Cingular Wireless customer service representative Aldo Marquez said Tuesday that a tower outage in the Houston area had caused the service difficulties. Marquez could not specify the exact date or the cause of the problems with the tower.

“There was a south tower outage,” he said. “There could have been any number of things wrong with the tower that caused problems.”

Cingular has more than 100 towers in the Houston area.

Sid Richardson College senior Jessica Kubiak said she experienced dropped calls Sunday.

“It’s supposed to be the network with the [fewest] dropped calls, and I definitely had a few dropped calls,” Kubiak said. “It was really inconvenient.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, all service problems in the area had been resolved, Marquez said.

— Natalie Kone

Early Decision admissions decline

Mirroring a decline in the number of early decision applicants, fewer students were admitted through early decision for the Class of 2011.

About 17 percent fewer students were admitted through Rice’s binding early decision program, down to 145 students from 175 admitted for the Class of 2010. Early decision applicants declined about 14 percent to 507 from the record-high 587 applicants in 2005. Under the Early Decision program, applications are due Nov. 1 and decisions are mailed Dec. 15.

Vice President for Enrollment Chris Munoz said the decline may be due to national trends away from early decision programs. Last September, Harvard College and Princeton University announced they were eliminating their early admissions programs. Rice will not change its early admissions policies, which includes non-binding Interim Decision.

“There are other universities of Rice’s caliber who are also down [in the number of applicants], and the explanation that is being put out is that the decisions that were made by Harvard [has] had a sort of trailing effect,” Munoz said.

However, the number of interim and regular decision applications is greater this year than at this time last year, Munoz said. The target class size will be about 720-730 students, the same as it has been over the past five years, Munoz said.

Munoz declined to comment on the demographic information of this year’s applicants, but he did say the number of minority applicants increased. Last year, 5 African American and 19 Hispanic students applied through early decision. Both were slight decreases from the previous year.

— Amy Liu

University Board selects two new trustees

Rice University’s Board of Trustees recently elected two new members. CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Hector Ruiz (Ph.D. ‘73) and Chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young James Turley (Lovett ‘77) began their terms as trustees Jan. 1.

President David Leebron said board members are usually replaced as they leave office, but Ruiz and Turley were elected in January because there were empty slots on the board. The two were chosen by the Trustees Committee, a group of trustees that meets four times per year to discuss suggestions about board members.

Turley, who lives in New York, earned two degrees from Rice — a B.A. in economics and an M.A. in accounting. He began working for Ernst & Young after he graduated from Rice, and he became CEO in 2003.

Ruiz received a Ph.D from Rice in electrical engineering and became president of AMD in 2000. He was named CEO in 2002 and Chairman of the Board in 2004.

Leebron said he thinks Ruiz and Turley bring useful experience from the business world.

“They understand strategy and they understand the problems enterprises face,” he said. “While we are not a profit-making business, we face a lot of the same issues.”

Leebron also said the new trustees are involved in the Rice community.

“[Turley] has been very involved with the Jones School and comes down regularly,” Leebron said. “Ruiz has been in touch with various people on campus. He actually knew a number of people in faculty on campus that he has stayed in touch with over the years.”

Leebron said Ruiz, the first trustee whose only degree from Rice is a Ph.D., plans to focus on recruiting and retaining minority engineers.

Trustees serve on the board for terms of four years.

— Beko Binder

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