<p>There are a few downers to Brown, but most of them are pretty subtle. Let me explain.</p>
<p>I’m an 09 grad, currently in a top 5 medical school’s MD-PhD program. I was a biochemistry/math double major while at Brown, and in both departments had many excellent teachers and not-so-good teachers - I credit a lot of the reasons why I’m here to my biochem profs who really knew how to grind difficult knowledge into your head (Art Salomon, Mark Johnson, David Cane, etc, all excellent profs). The main reasons I applied ED to Brown were the open curriculum (valid) and the PLME program (not as valid), and I filled out my application in a way that if I got rejected PLME I was still locked into going to the school. (to give you some bearings, I think my high school stats are on here somewhere, but the highlights include qualification for the USAMO and USABO)</p>
<p>For most people, the open curriculum is really great. And it was for me too - it was very convenient to not have to deal with core requirements while picking classes. Unfortunately, if you’re pre-med or pre-professional, those requirements take up so much of your time ANYWAY that you may as well have a core to deal with. So that advantage was nullified. I’m not saying its as bad as Columbia, where I’m told the core will eat your soul, but its just as bad as a place like Yale, Penn, or Harvard, which has a manageable but sizable set of requirements. Same issue with the pass/fail system; I took very few (I think none, actually) courses pass-fail because I knew how bad that would look. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but if you’re considering a pre-professional track you should keep that in mind.</p>
<p>The other big problem with Brown has everything to do with ranking and name recognition. I don’t want to launch into a huge debate about why Brown is ranked so low in the USNWR (worse than Northwestern? ***?), but I think everyone can agree that its ranked lower than HYPS (its still a top 10 school in my eyes, and one that you have to work hard to go to. You’ll never hear me say that Brown is a 2nd-tier institution, just a 1.5-tier one). And there’s a reason for that. Brown’s undergraduate has an incredible marketing campaign going, saying that they’re completely focused on undergrads as an institution. While this may look really good on paper, essentially all this means is that all of Brown’s graduate programs are pretty bad - and the literature bears this out. In terms of HHMI scholars, NIH grants, NSF funding, etc, Brown almost UNIVERSALLY comes up short. What does that mean for you as an undergraduate? Well, if you’re going to go to grad or med school, you’ll necessarily be doing a little research, of course. But you’re not going to be doing research with a leader in your field. In fact, you’ll probably be doing research with, at best, a lieutenant in your field. Furthermore, the research facilities available to you are simply not up to par. For example, for a series of experiments I was participating in as an undergrad, we were severely hampered by not having a next-generation DNA sequencer, which is something that many other biology departments have fairly easy access to. Not only did this compromise our publishing timetable, it meant our results weren’t nearly as robust as we would have liked. So if you want to see what high-powered, ground-breaking research is like (and even participate in said research), Brown is probably not the place you want to go, in ANY field.</p>
<p>Another sort of myth that gets promulgated about Brown is that its the most laid-back, liberal, easygoing ivy. Let me make two points clear. First, no matter where you go, if you want to be laid back, you can be laid back (except MIT). Note I said be “laid back”, not “slack off” (although you can do that too). Just stay on top of your work and don’t kill yourself with many hard classes. My friends at HYPS were just as laid back as I was, sometimes even more - this is not unique to Brown. Secondly, you’re going to find liberals and conservatives wherever you go - maybe the ratio will be a little skewed at Brown, but so what? You can elect not to hang out with Evangelical creationists at Yale just as easily as not hanging out with them at Brown. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Brown also portrays itself as the pot-smoking, sexually-liberated Ivy. Guess what people? You can get marijuana and casual sex no matter which college you go to (sometimes at the same time), including much better colleges! So don’t feel like you have to go to Brown in order to have some fun (and my fun I don’t mean your parents brand of fun, with the playing of the monopoly and whatnot) - you can have that anywhere! Brown loves to play up SexPowerGod, for example, as the bacchanalia of elite higher-education, but those sorts of parties exist wherever you go. </p>
<p>Essentially, whatever academic field Brown does, there are at least 5 colleges that do it better, with more money, and with just as much undergraduate participation. And whatever perceived unique student-life characteristic that Brown has, they simply advertise it more than other schools who don’t need to. The idea that Brown has created a uniquely liberal and open academic society is patently untrue - my friends at other, more highly-regarded institutions have had just as much success approaching professors for summer research jobs and extracurriculars. The extracurricular opportunities offered to you at Brown are good, but the opportunities at HYPSMCaltechPennColumbia are even better, no matter what area of study you go into. </p>
<p>PS. For you premeds out there, whatever you do, don’t apply PLME. Its Brown’s way of subtly locking very good students into going to the 30th ranked med school in the country.</p>