Hello,
As the title indicates, I’m stuck between Brown and Wellesley. Although I’ve visited both, I’m more familiar with Wellesley – Brown was a reach I applied to on a whim. I intend to major in something English related, because I would dearly love to be a writer. But I know that’s a rather difficult thing to accomplish, so I’d like to keep my options open to double major or to change majors altogether. I feel Brown would offer me more room to explore in this regard.
However, I’m concerned that I wouldn’t fit into Brown socially. I’m not huge on parties, Greek life, etc. and Wellesley seemed to have a much quieter campus. I also got more of a sense of community at Wellesley, although I definitely could be mistaken about that. These factors made Wellesley feel more comfortable for me, but I know that college isn’t necessarily about being super comfortable all of the time.
…basically, I’m not sure what to do, and while I know the decision comes down to me (even my parents are split – my mom for Wellesley, my dad for Brown) I would greatly appreciate any thoughts or feedback. 
Oh, and financial aid isn’t a major factor; they offered very similar deals.
Go to Brown. You don’t have to participate in greek life/partying unless you want to. You will find many students like yourself at Brown.
Thank you very much for the perspective @SternBusiness.
My mom went to wellesley and loved it. She felt that it was a nice and cooperative environment with a lot of incredibly smart and focused women. She thought the all-women aspect was a lot less distracting, but she still hung out with mit frats on the weekend. She loved the professors and resources, and a lot of her friends did a semester or year either at an ivy school or abroad. They have a lot of career and internship resources.
I’m looking at brown right now. They have just as many resources, but a different environment. It is more competitive, and it is known for its social life aspect. Providence, though, is not as big or as busy as Boston. The main perks of brown are its freedom, where you can design your own concentration and earn certificates in any area that can be added to your degree, and its art scene. You can take classes and/or mix with students from RISD, which is a huge draw for me.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but Brown has graduate programs and Wellesley doesn’t.
@Rafalala Wellesley is not in Boston. It’s a 30 minute drive and a 40 minute train ride. Those trains aren’t running very late at night (I’ve gotten stuck at North Station before- not a fun experience), so from a social perspective, Boston’s nightlife isn’t hugely/conveniently accessible to someone attending Wellesley without a car.
I think you should go to Brown. The academic freedom at that school is truly something special. It’s also not the wild party school that Duke or Dartmouth are. You will have no trouble finding your people there.
@Qwerty568 you’re right, wellesley is 12 miles outside of Boston, thirty minutes if you’re driving. However, it is considered the center of wellesley social life outside of school. My mom spent weekends in the city, and it was considered where you went if you were interested in party life or social scene. Buses run every hour until 2am. It’s an important factor to consider if you’re considering social life as a factor
I don’t think you will suffer socially at Brown. Listen to yourself and choose the place where you want to be. And, take all the time you need to decide!
@Rafalala, it’s interesting that you say that Brown is more competitive than Wellesley. The impression that I got was the other way around. But you’re right that its academic freedom is a huge benefit. Good luck if you end up applying!
@Qwerty568 I’m from MA, so I’m familiar with the horrors of North Station 
It’s good to hear that Brown’s party life isn’t as wild as it could be; I’ve heard mixed things in that regard.
@Belizeme thank you for the advice! I’m trying my best to figure out what I want.
@SpringAwake15 I mean, coed schools and schools with Greek life will, in general, have more of a party scene than a small, all-women’s college. That’s definitely true. Do its parties overshadow its academics? No way! Plus, at any institution with high-caliber students, there will ALWAYS be students that don’t party. It’s not ASU. And I would disagree that Wellesley is less competitive than Brown. I have family at both, and I would definitely say that Wellesley is the more competitive of the two. Brown is very easygoing considering how selective it is. Wellesley has more of that intense, competitive atmosphere-but remember, that atmosphere is pretty common at top schools. If adcoms didn’t think you would handle it, they wouldn’t admit you!
Good luck
To me, it sounds like really want to go to Wellesley, but your whim-school came out of nowhere and threw a monkey wrench into the decision. Your task now is whether you’re torn because you truly like Brown and Wellesley equally, or whether you’re torn because the prestige and open curriculum of Brown is luring you from where you really want to be.
First, why do you think you’d have more room to explore majors at Brown than Wellesley? If it’s because of Brown’s open curriculum, that doesn’t necessarily matter - core curricula offer students the opportunity to take courses in areas they wouldn’t have otherwise explored. For example, one of my favorite classes at my small LAC was a biology class I took to satisfy the science requirement. Wellesley has a decent selection of majors, including ones related to writing and the humanities that might appeal to you (comparative literature, several cultural studies majors, language studies/linguistics). The thing to do is look to see if there are any majors at Brown that really excite you, that you’d like to explore, and that would be impossible to construct at Wellesley. (Example: There’s an urban studies major at Brown, but you could probably recreate that using a set of sociology and other classes at Wellesley if you planned well. There’s a Science and Technology Studies program, but that might be approximated with the media arts and sciences major at Wellesley. But public policy or Egyptology and Assyriology might be difficult to approximate at Wellesley.)
Wellesley has a writing program, but Brown also has the literary arts program.
I think that most top schools don’t really have crazy ragers and drunken raves on a regular basis - most students at both Brown and Wellesley will be somewhat serious, focused, academic individuals. They had to be, in order to get into Wellesley or Brown. People will party, but you can always avoid parties and drinking and Greek life if you don’t want it at Brown. So I don’t think that’s a reason not to choose Brown.
You said you visited both. Where do you feel like you fit in more? Where do you feel more comfortable? When you close your eyes and picture yourself on both campuses, which one makes you give a contented sigh or smile without realizing it? Both of them are elite colleges that will confer lots of opportunities on you; you really can’t go wrong either way, so your choice is really going to be about where felt like home for you, and where you feel like you’ll develop to your academic and personal best.
It sounds to me like you want to go to Wellesley too. It IS important to be comfortable at a school because you will be spending four years of your life there – it’s like buying a house on a lease! (But the house would probably be cheaper LOL)
Don’t judge Brown off of the party atmosphere. There are partiers at every school and you can’t avoid that or Greek life, but you CAN choose not to participate and to actively socialize in other ways. Surely, there are people who have similar mindsets and want to avoid the party/Greek scene. Brown has great academics, especially for Literary Arts/English majors such as yourself.
This is a tough decision so I can’t really tell you which way to sway. Brown at a decent price is too good to pass up, but then again, you can’t always look at the prestige factor either. If you’re considering Brown mostly because of its Ivy status, you’re not considering it for the right reasons. You sound like you’re more comfortable with Wellesley so if that’s where you feel best at, that’s what matters.
My mom said the biggest shock at wellesley was how smart everyone was, so I was a bit off in saying it’s less competitive. At least at first, everyone is trying to prove how smart they are, but she meant that once you find your group, it is a calmer environment.
@juillet, your first sentence really hits the nail on the head. Wellesley is the school that I’ve been picturing myself at for a really long time, but I’m starting to wonder whether that was because it really is the best school for me, or because I felt that it was the only school on my list that I really liked AND felt I had a chance at getting in to (I had several safety schools as well that I would’ve been happy going to, but Wellesley was far and away my favorite).
I’ve been thinking about fit for the past week, and where I think I would be better suited, but honestly, it’s been really inconclusive. I’m not sure where I’d be happier, or what sort of environment would fit me better. I think that Wellesley’s environment and student body more closely fit the person that I am now, but Brown might help me grow as a person, in addition to helping me grow as a student and a writer.
I think I’m probably going to spend tomorrow closely analyzing their course selections and really digging through their websites to see if I can sway myself one way or another. If I can’t, I’ll just flip a coin, see if I’m happy with the results, and go from there.
Thank you very much to everyone who’s taken the time to comment If anyone else has any advice or opinions on the two, I’d love to hear them!
I’m a Brown alum who visited Wellesley for the first time a few weeks ago. While Wellesley is a beautiful campus, it is so different from Brown. Wellesley seemed like a gated oasis, removed from its environment, serene but isolating. Brown is integrated into the community; just to get around campus you walk through residential and commercial streets, see people who aren’t students. It’s a much livelier campus.
Some people want that removed, gated, insular experience in college – I don’t want to paint that as a negative necessarily. It’s just not what I wanted.
I know one person who went to Wellesley. She said the academics were superb and loved her classes and professors. But she had a really rough time socially. For example, freshman year her dorm was not all freshmen, and she found it really hard to make friends because the upperclassmen had already formed their social groups. Many of the students were focussed so much on academics that they weren’t interested in a social life. She chose Wellesley partly because, like you, she’s not a partier. But she felt the Wellesley students went too far in the other direction. This is just one student’s opinion and experience. But I have to say that her experience changed my overall opinion of Wellesley.
@fireandrain Thank you for that perspective. If I may ask, as a Brown alum, how would you describe the social scene there? I know that the parties/Greek culture/etc. are all avoidable, but would you describe them as an important part of social life? And do you think that the open curriculum was really beneficial over a more traditional academic structure?
You have two fantastic choices and I think you should feel free to choose the one you like best, which suits your style. I think they both have a very good reputation so you really can take that out of the equation. I think they are each special in their own way so you have to figure out which is most special to you because you have to give up one environment’s advantages for the other.
I will mention a couple of things about Brown, as it is what I know through my daughter. It seems that you haven’t looked into it that much, as you mentioned Greek life which is pretty minor. Only 18 pct men and 8 pct women are affiliated.I just looked that up and I am surprised that it is even that many. I know my daughter spend a lot of time just hanging out with friends. She also really enjoyed some of the big activities like the famous concerts at Spring Break, and some fun things like bouncy house parties for freshmen and a giant slip n slide on the campus green. Remember that you are only looking at freshman year but at some point you are going to be an upperclassman and it will be likely you will want to go to some parties. She did do sub free housing freshman year, just not knowing what it would be like, but found she didn’t need to and wouldn’t have do it again in a do-over.
Also she liked having the grad students to interact with in her department, they are people to model yourself on an see what they are doing and where they are going. Aso she worked with grad students on research teams and went to the grad student teas for her dept when she was a Sr, they are for socializing while sharing research news and progress. But the undergrad population is much larger and remains the focus. There are consequently a lot of very interesting jobs available for p/t work that would go to grad students elsewhere.
Perhaps I should have made clear that I’m an old alum – although my daughter did recently graduate from Brown. If you search around the Brown forum, you should find several threads about Brown’s social life.
I’m pretty confident that you can avoid Greek life – granted, I don’t know all the details of my daughter’s time at Brown, but I’m 95% sure she did not spend her Friday and Saturday nights at frat parties. You will encounter drunk students – probably more drunk students at Brown than at Wellesley, although that’s a guess. A lot of the drinking at Brown happens in students’ dorm rooms and in later years, off-campus apartments. I am pretty confident that most students don’t drink all the time, even every weekend.
When I was at Brown, I had a group of friends who occasionally did drugs (mainly pot). They never invited me to those parties, because they knew how I felt, they respected my decisions, didn’t judge me and never challenged me to change. I’m still good friends with them now (they stopped the drug use years ago). I don’t think things have changed. I sure hope not.
As for the open curriculum – really, that’s the hallmark of a Brown education. It means you, and not some administrator, decides what courses you take. If you want to develop your own distribution requirements – either based on your own beliefs or copied from another school – you can certainly do that. The open curriculum means that the students in your classes want to be there – they are in that class because they want to study that subject, not because someone else wants them to. For the right person – and only you can decide if you are that person – I think the open curriculum is wonderful. It’s not more or less beneficial than distribution requirements. Some students need that structure, because they don’t know what they want to study, because they want what someone else has defined as a “well-rounded” education, because they don’t handle choices well.
Academically both schools are really strong. I think you need to dig deep about what type of social life you want. I think Brown students are more outgoing; Wellesley students more cerebral. If they really want to party and socialize, many of them leave campus for MIT/Harvard/Tufts. Which means Wellesley is a quiet campus. The mother of the Wellesley student I know commented that the Wellesley students were almost always in their rooms – never just hanging out on the green space. That would NEVER happen at Brown – as soon as there is a hint of warmth in the air there are students sitting outside, playing frisbee outside, etc. I’m trying really hard not to be negative about Wellesley, because for some students, that’s exactly the atmosphere they want. I wouldn’t want it – but that’s me.
Feel free to PM me if you want more info.
I am usually a big fan of LAC’s (especially outstanding ones like Wellesley) and almost always recommend them over larger universities, but Brown is such an unusually stellar institution in the fields of English and Literary Arts that if I were you I would have a very hard time passing up the opportunity to study with the faculty there. Wellesley has a wonderful English department with a strong creative writing concentration, so if you prefer Wellesley for other reasons by all means go there as it is a great choice over all. But unless you are planning eventually to do an MFA or PhD in English (in which case maybe save Brown as a goal for grad school), it would be an excellent choice for your specific fields of interest.
Thank you so much for the responses, everyone. It took me until today to decide, but I finally made the choice to go with Brown. I still think that Wellesley is a great school, but I ultimately decided that Brown’s flexible curriculum and larger selection of courses would be more beneficial for me. I also realized, for a couple of different reasons, that I preferred Brown’s location. It wasn’t an easy choice, but it’s made, and I really appreciate the perspectives that everyone here offered.
Great decision! You’ll love Brown.