<p>hi, everyone. i’m a senior right now trying to narrow down my college choices to the ones i really honestly think i could see myself attending. </p>
<p>so while i am interested in brown, i was wondering you guys could give me a completely honest portrait of what it’s like to be a student there.</p>
<p>maybe you could answer the following questions?</p>
<p>1.) what are the classes like? extremely hard? fairly easy? interesting? i know since there’s an open curriculum, you might not have to take really hard classes if you don’t want to, but on average, what are the classes like? lectures? small, discussion-based? etc.
2.) i want to be a movie editor/producer/filmmaker. i know brown is not well-known for film. i am applying to schools known for film (usc, chapman, nyu, etc) but i like brown as a school anyway. if i were to go to brown instead of a film-centric school, would i pretty much kiss my chances of being a filmmaker goodbye?
3.) i’m a bi guy, and i know brown is gay-friendly, but are there plenty of bi guys/girls too? i want to make sure i fit in and everything. also, i generally get along better friend-wise with straight or bi guys than gay guys. i do have gay friends though, but i want to be able to have all different kinds of friends, gay, straight, bi. are the majority of the guys gay or are there plenty of all orientations?
4.) does it get boring at brown? i hear that the neighboring city doesn’t offer much and that it can boring. true? false?
5.) what do people generally do for fun at brown? i’m interested in joining a lot of student clubs. but i don’t like drinking or doing drugs. are clubs big ways of socializing? how prevalent is drinking/drugs?
6.) how is financial aid? i’d need a ton to go there.
7.) i haven’t taken pre-cal or calculus. took honors algebra II, honors geometry, and stats though. would i be automatically rejected from brown? </p>
<p>and any other info about what it’s REALLY like to be at brown would be really helpful. thanks a lot guys!</p>
<p>Not to sound rude, but literally every question you asked is a common question that you should be able to find a lot more information on by using the search function.</p>
<p>well i’ve looked some of them up, but it seems a lot of threads have differing answers and not a lot of straightforward answers. :-/ like i’ve seen some people on threads say that taking advanced math classes is necessary to get into brown and others say it’s not. same with a lot of the questions. </p>
<p>so this thread is really asking for a completely honest, no sugar-coated portrait of brown so i can really know if i should even bother applying. i don’t want any nice, encouraging “well, you COULD maybe get a job in the film industry” if the answer is realistically “no, there’s not many hollywood connections”. i hope that clears it up a bit. :)</p>
<p>1) Look it up.
2) The president of 20th Century Fox Entertainment went here, as did the president of the music division at 20th Century Fox. There are many Brown students in the film industry, though many are kind of outside of the blockbuster Hollywood scene.
3) I have no idea about the size of the bi community. We have people of all shapes and color here and are considered to be a pretty comfortable place for people of all orientations as far as I can tell.
4) Search.
5) Search.
6) Excellent if your combined family income is lower than about 80k. Above that we’re better than most places in the country, but a few of our peers really start to kick in with more money than we do at that marker.
7) Just about nothing results an automatic rejection.</p>
<p>You’re not going to get paragraph long answers in this thread because all of your questions have thousands of words written on them in various threads already.</p>
<p>thanks, melody! :)</p>
<p>Everyone has a different experience at Brown, so there is no one “right” answer. That’s why you’re seeing a variety of opinions on older threads. </p>
<p>For example, your question about classes. Someone majoring in Egyptology is going to have a vastly different experience than someone majoring in political science, and both of them will have a different experience than the person majoring in physics. Your experience will vary based on what classes you take – it could even be different from semester to semester. This will be the case almost any college you go to. Brown has hard and easy classes, large lectures and small seminars. What is a hard class for one person might be a breeze for someone else. </p>
<p>There was just recently someone else who queried about the entertainment industry. There are a ton of Brown alums in a wide variety of entertainment jobs, both in front of and behind the camera. If your goal is to be a major motion picture director, then there are some California schools that might make more sense. But there are Brown grads who are major motion picture directors – check out Doug Liman on imdb. So it can be done.</p>
<p>I’m going to echo mm and say – do a search and read all the old threads here. You’ll learn a lot about Brown, get most of your questions answered – and realize that there is no one right answer to most questions.</p>