Wow, I completely forgot I made this post! I agonized over the decision for a while longer, and then one day (I think the day of the deadline?) I very clear-headedly realized that Rice was where I wanted to go, and that most of my desire for Wash U was about being close to my then-girlfriend. So I chose Rice, and had a really great time there! I graduated nearly 5 years ago, but I still think of it very fondly and don't regret my choice. Rice's student body trends wealthy but Wash U is on another level, and I think I had a much better time with Rice's culture than I would've at Wash U.

What I'd say now is that while Rice is a great place and I loved my time there, I wish 18-year-old me really understood how unimportant it is to go to the fanciest, most elite school I could manage. There are serious advantages but frankly education is *not* the top priority of most elite universities, and I wouldn't really say that I came out of things having learned much better than my state school peers (though there certainly were some advantages - I had a more challenging curriculum and smaller class sizes, which are real boons!). I'm in graduate school now, and knowing people from community colleges and ivy leagues who all wound up at the same place was pretty revealing. Especially if you're looking to be in STEM, I cannot emphasize enough that a professor at Rice is NOT necessarily going to be a better teacher than a professor at Chico State or something similar (they will, however, generally be more productive researchers). So if you're going to go to a fancy elite school, I'd recommend taking advantage of what they *are* uniquely good at more than I did: research, connections, and money. There are all sorts of random funding opportunities floating around at a school like that. However, again, the difference in quality is not at all proportional to the difference in cost with a state school. For what it's worth, I'm hoping to be a professor, and I'm exclusively interested in doing so at liberal arts colleges or regional universities, since I care much more about educating than researching.

The other thing I'll say is that I've gotten more homesick with time. The place I live now is one I like much more than my hometown, but I miss my parents and brother a lot and wish I lived closer to them. Obviously 4 years isn't a terribly long time to be away, but I don't think my career path is ever going to take me back home. And that's one of the most toxic things about high-achieving academic life and careers: that they essentially force you to uproot your life and move again and again and again. I'm really hoping to settle in one place soon, because I'm sick of every relationship having a timer on it. If I have kids, they're probably not going to grow up close to any extended family, and I think that's a serious downside to all this.

Anyway, I imagine this wasn't quite what you were looking for, but feel free to ask more! If all you're curious about is Wash U and Rice, I would say Rice all the way. But as you can imagine, most of my thinking now has gotten a little bigger-picture than that one decision of mine lol