Peer Academic Advisors

Meet Your Peer Academic Advisors

At Rice, academic advising is multi-layered and mutually reinforcing. The idea is to help you to become fully responsible for your academic and intellectual life at the university. This means, of course, that you have to have access to good information and to good advice. By your third day on campus, you'll possess a proper handful of advising pathways that, when followed carefully, will help you to become your best Rice self.

Here, we want to call your attention to fellow Humanities students who have been selected and trained to help you navigate your academic life from O-Week to your very last semester. They are part of the university's larger system of Peer Academic Advisors, and we hope that you'll make a concerted effort to seek them out. They are phenomenal resources. Keep in mind, you're not limited to speaking only with PAAs from your college. Be adventurous!

PAAs come in three basic flavors: Each college has one or two Head PAAs who provide leadership for the program in their particular college. There are also O-Week PAAs. They are a subset of PAAs who have been selected to work on campus during new student orientation. Year-Long PAAs round out each college's PAA cohort. They arrive and are ready to work once the school year gets under way. Athletic PAAs are especially well attuned to the special demands and opportunities of scholar-athletes (but again, you can seek out Athletic PAAs even if you don't plan to letter at Rice).