[Cyranix]

I'm a Rice University alumnus (Hanszen '07), and your sentiment definitely resonates with me. When I took my first programming job, I had two offers come in at the same time: one to stay in Houston and write Java code for pipeline scheduling, the other to head to Austin and work for a small crummy independent company. Houston has so much going for it, and if I had felt like a vibrant tech startup scene were present, I might have stayed. Instead, I left behind my entire friend group and taking a job that paid half of what the energy industry was offering, purely for the sake of better future opportunities.

I know there are some entrepreneurial efforts being made at my alma mater, but overall it feels like a huge missed opportunity. The business school is strongly walled off from the undergrad population, the excellent CS department tends toward the academic side (with rare exceptions like COMP 410/415 [1]), and personally I never saw much of an attempt on the part of the local tech scene to get students integrated. There is the Rice Alliance [2] but it isn't quite the same as an organic grassroots-y scene.

[1] http://www.bandgap.cs.rice.edu/classes/comp410/ [2] http://alliance.rice.edu/