Rice Business professor Mijeong Kwon finds that viewing passion for work as a moral virtue can harm employees and teams, leading to guilt, burnout and biased treatment of colleagues who are seen as less passionate.
In honor of the season of thanksgiving, we turned to our Rice MBA students to share what they’re most grateful for. From the supportive community to our home in Houston, there’s so much to love about Rice Business.
From the first step prospective students take into McNair Hall, they know that Rice Business is special. For some, it’s because of our location or our programs — for others, it’s the tight-knit community and lifelong friendships.
Every faculty, staff, student and alumnus has a unique reason they choose to call Rice Business home. This season, we turn to our current MBA students to find out what keeps them inspired on their journey — and what they’re most grateful for.
Here’s what they said.
What are you most grateful for?
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This year, I'm grateful that my family and friends haven't let me fall off the grid. They are always checking in, inviting me out to dinner, offering support and ensuring I carve out time for my own hobbies and interests.
Rachel Nevins, Professional MBA ’27
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I’m thankful to have overcome different challenges after moving to a new country — and for the opportunity to keep growing.
Victoria (Li) He, Full-Time MBA ’27
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This fall, I’ve been especially grateful for professors who challenge us to think bigger and for classmates who have supported me through a crazy recruiting cycle. Thanks to that support, I’m heading toward an exciting role next summer.
Samuel Schultz, Full-Time MBA ’27
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I'm grateful for the opportunity to make new friends that are kind and supportive of one other, both in the program and outside of class.
I’m thankful to have the opportunity to grow in a safe environment, personally and professionally.
Raven Chanelle Hollins, Professional MBA ’27
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I'm grateful for the friends, mentors, and family who have supported me as I've begun my MBA journey. Because of their support, I have even more to be grateful for — like the outstanding professors, classmates and experiences I've gained.
Ben Neukomm, Professional MBA ’27
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I'm grateful for all who have poured into me.
James Morrison Jr., DMD, Executive MBA ’27
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I'm thankful for my family supporting me through my MBA journey — they've given me the platform I need to give my all to this program. I am also thankful for my dog for making me smile everyday.
Kelley Dougherty, Professional MBA ’27
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I'm grateful to be part of such an encouraging environment that promotes learning and personal growth.
Derek Giuseppetti, Professional MBA ’27
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I’m grateful for the chance to learn alongside motivated classmates who value collaboration and connection.
Smitha Ajjampur, Professional MBA ’27
At Rice Business, gratitude extends beyond individual experiences — it’s a reflection of a supportive, deeply connected community. From faculty and staff to students and alumni, the bonds created here foster an environment where everyone can thrive in their journey.
This season, we celebrate the tight-knit community that makes Rice Business truly special.
Rice Business clubs reflect professional pathways, cultural backgrounds, shared experiences and a variety of hobbies. Continue reading about why MBA clubs and organizations are so important to our community and how to get involved.
Discover how Rice Business MBA students are supported through personalized academics, career coaching, community culture and deep connections in Houston.
Rice Business offers a rich variety of courses across its programs, including 100+ electives for Full-Time MBAs, allowing students to dive and excel in topics they’re passionate about. Here are some of our students’ favorite courses.
Rice Business professor Mijeong Kwon argues that moralizing a love of work can undermine workplace well-being. Her research shows that treating intrinsic motivation as a virtue fuels guilt, burnout and biased judgments that disrupt team dynamics.
Wondering how to secure an MBA scholarship at a top program like Rice Business? Here’s how to navigate your options.
The price of an MBA can feel daunting, but unlike paying for a car or pair of designer shoes, the long-term return on your investment is real and significant.
To increase your return on investment, Rice Business invests more scholarship funding per Full-Time MBA student than almost every other school nationwide. More than 95% of our Full-Time MBA students receive scholarship support, with the average annual award topping $40,000 per year.
That level of investment comes from the giving from our alumni who have seen the difference this education has had on their careers and financial security. It demonstrates the belief in our students and reflects the talent and potential we see in applicants.
If you’re curious about how scholarships are funded, how awards are determined or what other aid options might be available to you as a Rice MBA, this guide will walk you through it.
Sourcing Rice Business Scholarships
Scholarships at Rice Business are powered by a combination of school investment and donor generosity.
Endowed scholarships
Endowed scholarships are permanent funds created through the generosity of our donors to support students year after year. These are invested as part of the university’s endowment, meaning the principal stays intact, and a portion of the earnings provides ongoing scholarship support for our students.
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Entrance to McNair Hall, home of Rice Business.
This structure helps attract exceptional students from different backgrounds, reduce financial barriers for talented individuals and benefit students for generations.
For donors, an endowed scholarship creates a lasting legacy through a named fund that reflects their values. For students, these scholarships offer support beyond the numbers — they establish a deep personal connection with the donors who made their education possible. Today, Rice Business has 90 of these long-term donor-created funds.
Annual Giving Scholarships
Annual giving scholarships also play an important role. These gifts are raised and awarded within the same year, offering immediate support rather than being invested permanently.
Annual giving scholarships are essential to Rice’s ability to remain accessible and competitive. Because they are renewed each year through the generosity of alumni, friends, and corporate partners, these scholarships give Rice the flexibility to meet the greatest need and strengthen each incoming class.
Every contribution from the Rice Business community makes a real and immediate impact for students.
George Andrews, associate dean of degree programs, at this year's scholarship luncheon.
Unlike some schools, every applicant to the Rice Full-Time MBA program is automatically considered for scholarships. Last year, more than 160 students received named awards.
“Scholarship decisions are made by our admissions and recruiting team in collaboration with our financial aid and external relations teams — intentionally incorporating multiple points of view to avoid bias,” says George Andrews, associate dean of degree programs.
In assessing MBA applicants, the team looks at indicators of academic readiness and professional trajectory, including:
Undergraduate performance
Test scores
Work experience
Leadership
Demonstrated impact
Clarity of career goals
“We also consider how a candidate will contribute to the classroom and the broader Rice Business community. The more a student brings to that environment, the stronger the scholarship potential,” says Andrews.
How MBA Scholarship Allocation Works
Each year, Rice Business sets a new scholarship budget for incoming MBAs. As applicants are admitted across rounds, awards are assigned based on the relative strength of each candidate within that round’s pool. That’s one reason we encourage students to apply early, when the pool is typically smaller.
This approach ensures consistency and fairness and helps shape a class with varied experiences and career goals. Admitted students learn about any scholarship awards in their admissions acceptance letter before the first semester begins.
Rice Business is known as one of the most generous with aid. Almost all Full-Time MBA students receive scholarship support, and the average total award now exceeds $80,000.
While I knew Rice was the perfect fit, I wasn’t sure it would be possible to return to school as a new mother. The James W. Crownover Scholars Fund made that dream a reality, opening doors for me to enter the full-time program and pursue my career ambitions.
Emily Smith
Full-Time MBA, Class of 2027
Additional Financial Aid Options
Scholarships are only one part of financing your MBA. Depending on your background, residency or service, you may also qualify for additional support. Many Rice MBA students combine several of these options:
Third-party scholarships. Our Student Financial Services office maintains a list of external scholarships to help students in their search.
Texas resident grants. Eligible residents may qualify for the need-based TEG Texas Grant, which provides an additional annual award.
Veterans benefits. Rice Business participates at the highest level of the Yellow Ribbon Program, and many veteran students receive substantial support.
Student loans. U.S. citizens and permanent residents can apply for federal student loans or explore private options.
Investing in your capital is one of the most important and impactful things you can do to ensure a financially rewarding future and you don’t have to navigate funding alone. Rice Business is committed to transparency and support — and to helping you access an education that will offer a return for the rest of your life.
Rice Business is committed to helping you accelerate your career at any stage and supporting your professional growth long after graduation. The earnings potential shows investing in an MBA is well worth it.
For social ventures rooted in marginalized communities, sharing their origin story can deter mainstream customers due to fear of stigma transfer.
Based on research by Diana Jue-Rajasingh (Rice Business) and Wesley W. Koo (Johns Hopkins)
Key takeaways:
Origin stories that highlight roots in marginalized communities carry social risk for consumers outside of those groups, making them wary of buying in.
Research shows the key reason for this is stigma transfer — the fear that purchasing the product will signal lower status by association.
However, framing the origin story in a certain way can encourage those same consumers to offer non-purchase support, such as joining a mailing list.
For social-venture founders, new research from Rice Business assistant professor Diana Jue-Rajasingh points to an uncomfortable tension: the origin story that anchors a company’s mission can, in some contexts, slow its growth.
Before earning her doctorate, Jue-Rajasingh co-founded Essmart, a company that distributes socially beneficial products across rural India. As the company expanded to more affluent customers, she faced a dilemma familiar to many mission-driven founders: how prominently to feature its rural roots.
“Do we emphasize our rural origin story as we expand? That was something we had to think about,” Jue-Rajasingh says. “Is it even useful to talk about the good we’re doing in villages when we’re marketing to people who may not care about that?”
To see whether that concern held up more broadly, Jue-Rajasingh partnered with longtime collaborator Wesley Koo of Johns Hopkins University. In a new paper published in the Strategic Management Journal, they examine how sharing a social venture’s origin story affects new customers and how different ways of framing that story shape consumer response.
When do origin stories backfire?
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Their survey-based field experiment confirms the worry. Affluent, urban consumers who heard an origin story tied to a poor, rural community were less likely to purchase the product and more likely to stigmatize its original customer base.
Jue-Rajasingh and Koo centered the study on Saathi Pads, a growing enterprise founded in 2015 to increase access to sanitary pads in rural India. Its early decentralized production model proved financially unsustainable, prompting a shift to centralized manufacturing and a new urban market — raising the question of how, or whether, to foreground Saathi’s social-mission origins.
To test the effects, the researchers recruited 283 female respondents at a university in Delhi and presented four versions of Saathi’s origin story: a basic rural-roots version; a technology version highlighting design choices; a social-impact version; and a combined tech-social version. A control group received no origin story. Participants then evaluated the company, product quality, and their likelihood of purchasing or recommending the pads.
“Part of me wants to say, ‘Own your story.’ But another part of me says, for the sake of ensuring you can grow your company, remember that sometimes you can’t tell the same story to everyone.”
What’s the role of stigma transfer?
As it turned out, none of the four framings increased purchase intent compared with the control condition of no origin story at all. Interestingly, however, respondents exposed to the social-impact version were slightly more willing to support the company in non-purchase ways, such as joining a mailing list.
To understand the aversion to these stories, the researchers tested three explanations: misunderstanding of the venture’s social mission, skepticism about motives and stigma transfer. The analysis pointed to this third explanation, stigma transfer, as the primary mechanism. Respondents who grew up in cities, had higher-status parents and reported higher incomes were especially likely to rate Saathi and its products as inferior after hearing the rural origin story.
“At first, the stigma finding surprised me,” Jue-Rajasingh says. But it also echoed her experience as a founder. “When we promoted our organization, we often featured a middle-class person on a poster to inspire lower-income audiences. I noticed organizations never did the reverse.”
The importance of strategic storytelling
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Jue-Rajasingh admits she feels conflicted about the implications of her study’s findings for social ventures.
“Part of me wants to say, ‘Own your story.’ But another part of me says, for the sake of ensuring you can grow your company, remember that sometimes you can’t tell the same story to everyone.”
Her findings also point to several areas where more research is needed. This study focused on a specific context — an Indian social enterprise, a women’s health product and an urban university sample — all of which shape how status dynamics show up. Future work could test whether similar stigma-transfer effects appear in different countries, with different types of products or across other consumer groups.
Another open question is whether certain forms of messaging, visual cues or trust-building strategies can reduce or counteract the stigma mechanism rather than simply avoiding it.
Still, Jue-Rajasingh says there are practical takeaways for founders and managers now. For example, audience targeting matters. “As much as you can, try to target your audience,” she says. “For a mainstream audience, emphasize how the origin story can benefit them; maybe that’s a design or technology tie-in. But for the original customers, those who really do care — you can keep telling your social origin story.”
In other words, the story doesn’t need to disappear. But social-venture leaders may need to decide when to center it, when to reframe it and when to let the product speak first.
New research shows that people rely on mental prototypes when discerning racial discrimination in the workplace — and Asian Americans are less likely to fit that template.
In startup accelerator programs, gender diversity alone doesn’t engage investors — what matters more is that founder and mentor teams align in their gender composition.
Rice Business Executive Education strengthens retention by giving leaders practical training in strategy, innovation and digital transformation. Expert faculty offer programs that build capability, support advancement and create real organizational impact.
In a city that prizes bold ideas and champions risk-taking, the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (LILIE) at Rice University has, over the past decade, become one of the country’s leading academic incubators, launching an array of inventive global ventures born in the Bayou City.
Avery Ruxer Franklin
Founded through generosity of Liu Family Foundation, LILIE invests bold ideas with entrepreneurial acumen, academic rigor, Houston-proud networking
In a city that prizes bold ideas and champions risk-taking, the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (LILIE) at Rice University has, over the past decade, become one of the country’s leading academic incubators, launching an array of inventive global ventures born in the Bayou City.
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Established in 2015 through a $16.5-million gift from the Liu Family Foundation, LILIE has thrived as a one-of-a-kind hub where ardent thinkers, rigorous academic course offerings and mentorship-minded faculty come together within a modern, collaborative workspace designed to take creative ideas from paper to real-world activation.
Since its inception, LILE has brought distinction to Rice as one of the nation’s leading entrepreneurship programs, serving more than 1,600 students each year and supporting over 100 innovative ventures annually. LILIE’s partnership with the Jones Graduate School of Business — recognized seven consecutive years by The Princeton Review as the nation’s No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program — makes Rice an enviable academic ecosystem where students are poised to succeed within the fast-changing business landscape
The milestone anniversary celebrates the vision behind its founding: to make Rice a fully integrated hotbed for entrepreneurship where visionary ideas find life beyond the campus walls. Offering dedicated courses, mentorship, business-savvy faculty and significant financial resources, LILIE is uniquely equipped to prepare innovators with skills to thrive in careers from nonprofit and small businesses to high-tech and Fortune 500 companies
The Liu Family Foundation’s investment helped position Rice and Houston as leaders in grooming young innovators with the ability to take ideas from the lab into the marketplace, enhancing and diversifying the global standing of both the city and its premier research university.
“By building this transformative platform for innovation and entrepreneurship, Rice has strengthened its standing as a launchpad of possibilities and ideas that place Houston at the forefront not just of energy, aerospace and medicine but as a global leader in digital technology, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy and biotechnology,” said Yael Hochberg, who heads LILIE.
In its first decade, more than 300 companies have been set into motion by LILIE-supported Rice graduates. These startups are as varied as they are inventive and include ventures focused on water purification, energy storage, laser-based medical devices, clean climate technologies, humanitarian aid data systems, air conditioning advancements, AI-powered data security and even running shoe technology to reduce leg and foot strain.
These student-led ventures were shaped, refined and supported through the LILIE network. Additionally, they have raised over $25 million in both dilutive and nondilutive funding to continue powering their world-changing ideas after graduation.
As LILIE looks ahead to its future, it will continue to evolve alongside rapid advances in AI and global innovation. As an accelerator for creative problem-solving, it will adapt to remain a leader in preparing students to help change the world.
At its core, LILIE believes in a future built by those bold enough to chase it. That was true at its start, remains so today and will continue for decades to come.
Research from Rice Business professor Tommy Pan Fang shows why some data center facilities cluster in cities for speed and access, while others move to rural regions in search of scale and lower costs.
The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has announced the 42 student-led teams that will compete in the 26th annual Rice Business Plan Competition this spring.
Rice Business climbs to No. 7 in the 2026 MBA entrepreneurship ranking, rising five spots and standing out for strong support, resources and outcomes for startup minded MBAs.
