Sweet Success
Rice celebrates graduate students’ competitive fellowships with cake.
Winter 2025
By Sarah Peters Yu
Photos Gustavo Raskosky
For Elena Mujica, the sweet taste of victory tastes a lot like strawberry pavlova and tres leches cake.
With a cake carefully balanced in each hand, she headed to the picnic tables outside Valhalla, Rice’s graduate student pub, to celebrate her GEM Fellowship and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program honorable mention with her friends and lab mates. She was one of about 100 graduate students to be recognized at Take the Cake, an annual event hosted in November by Seiichi Matsuda, the dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies.
The premise is simple: Each graduate student is awarded one cake of their choosing for every major external fellowship worth $5,000 or more. For Mujica, a first-year Ph.D. student in systems, synthetic and physical biology, that meant two cakes. “It feels good that my hands are so full,” Mujica says.
In the span of less than an hour, Matsuda and the graduate and postdoctoral studies office staff doled out 102 cakes from two local bakeries amounting to an estimated 2 or 3 million calories. The order was so large that one of the bakeries needed to rent a moving truck to deliver the goods.
The payoff is worth it. “It turns an individual win into a community win,” says Matsuda.
This definitely goes beyond what a lot of schools do. It goes back to the recurring theme of intentional support.
Take the Cake is another way Rice cares for its graduate students, says Jose Hernandez, a first-year bioengineering Ph.D. student from Oswego, Illinois, who chose a berry Chantilly cake in recognition of his GEM Fellowship, which supports him as he researches the link between the metabolism and mechanics of cancer cells.
“This definitely goes beyond what a lot of schools do,” Hernandez adds. “It goes back to the recurring theme of intentional support.”
Matsuda’s office also launched a coaching program that pairs students with other students who have won or applied to other major fellowships.
Central to this community are advisers like psychologist Danielle King and bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin, who came to cheer on their students. Ajo-Franklin is the thesis adviser to two students, Robyn Alba and Esther Jimenez, who received the NSF GRFP award and the NSF INTERN award, respectively. Jimenez’s award allowed her to expand her skill set while interning at a Houston company. Alba studies bacteria that make electrical currents in the hopes of engineering them to detect toxins. Her parents traveled from Dallas for the occasion.
“I have gone to Take the Cake the last two years to celebrate friends of mine,” Alba said. “Everyone loves cake, and it’s fun to set some time aside and celebrate and have good community.”
Danielle King is associate professor of psychological sciences in the School of Social Sciences. Caroline Ajo-Franklin is professor of biosciences in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and director of the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute.