Marty Grimes should feel right at home when he shuffles off to the big city of Houston this summer for his first year of college.

Rice, his educational destination, is about the same size as Grandview, his hometown.

Of course, there are differences that make each location unique.

There’s only one Houston Ship Channel and one Grandview Zebra.

Grimes has noticed the similarities more than the differences.

“Rice is in a big place,” he said. “Grandview is close to one.”

None of which explains why a smalltown boy from North Central Texas made Rice, one of the nation’s top academic institutions, his college choice.

“I know a guy who’s going there, Ryan Artecona,” Grimes said. “He was a junior at Grandview when I was a freshman. In UIL academics, he went to state in spelling and computer science. He was going to be an architect, but he’s undecided now. So he’s a philosophy major at Rice until he decides what he wants to do with his major. He’ll be a junior next year.”

Artecona did a good sales job.

“He told me how life is down there, how it’s a really close-knit community, how every sub-college at Rice has its own student council,” Grimes said. “I also liked the idea that you can study abroad for the same price as you pay at Rice.

“I visited Rice in February. The small-town feel appealed to me. I met some of the professors there. A computer science professor showed us a presentation with robots doing different tasks. He had undergraduates working on that. I got to attend three classes, and they were pretty small compared to what you’d see at A&M and UT. The multi-variable calculus class had eight or nine people.

“I did go to one large class with 50 or 60 people, an introduction to mechanical engineering.”

Tentatively, he plans to major in computer science, a lifelong passion.

“My friends were always interested in computers, and my teachers thought I’d be good at computer science,” Grimes said. “I just like learning. When I was real young, I was constantly asking my parents [Ricky and Chris Grimes] questions. I ended up learning negative numbers before kindergarten.

“We did a lot of computer work in labs in elementary school. We progressed to school projects, typically something like a power point at the end of the year. I did make about an 800-line [computer] game on my own. It’s based on the Pokemon series. I did that in seven or eight hours.”

Grimes is no johnny-come-lately to academic excellence.

In UIL academics, he competed in numbers sense and math all four years.

“Numbers sense is a 10-minute test where you do as many mental math problems as you can,” he said. “Math goes all the way through calculus. It was difficult my freshman year, because I hadn’t been presented with all the calculus. I also did science my freshman and sophomore year. I did decent in that.

“Junior year, I started accounting, and I ended up going to state in that. I placed fifth individually and first place team. This year, I did numbers sense, math and accounting and added computer science. We didn’t make it to state in accounting this time, but I did go in computer science. At state, I was fourth best individual.”

The state computer science exam features a 45-minute written quiz with 40 questions. You get six points for a correct answer. You lose two -points for an incorrect answer. You can know everything there is to know and still miss questions.

“They throw a lot of things in there to trick you,” Grimes said.

One would presume Grimes fared well on the SAT (college board) test. One would be correct. He scored 2,080 out of a possible 2,400, and he scored a perfect 800 in math.

“I took SAT 1 three times, and I took SAT 2 once. SAT 1 is what pretty much everyone takes. SAT 2 is what you take in a particular subject to show the college where you want to go that you can go above and beyond in that subject.”

He also applied to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and was turned down.

“I think my scores needed to be up quite a bit to go there, and I didn’t do as much community service as I should have,” he said.

He was accepted at Texas and said no when Rice gave him a thumbs-up on admission and $27,000 in scholarship help the first year.

To determine whether to extend the scholarships, he said, Rice will “re-evaluate what I did after each year.”

He also hopes to play for the Owl football team as a walk-on kicker. His longest field goal as a Zebra was 48 yards.

Athletics will understandably be secondary to academics at Rice, he said.

“My first year, I have physics, calculus and chemistry at 9, 10 and 11 o’clock. I’m definitely going to have to go to the library a lot. I’m not used to studying that much. With me, the harder something is, the more I’ll study for it.”

He’ll be the first person in his family to have attended college.

“My parents are excited,” Grimes said. “They’re kind of confused about where I got all my intelligence. They’re intelligent. They just didn’t go to college.”