<p>I’m very grateful to have offers from all three.</p>
<p>Which has the best English department? I’m interested in both an academic and creative writing track.</p>
<p>I can’t tell you which is better (because I’m not going to pretend I have the authority to), but Brown has an AMAZING English and Literary Arts (creative writing) program. You can really get a lot out of them. The English department, imo, has the most interesting classes and I’ve already taken two classes from the litarts department (keep in mind that I’m a freshman applied math concentrator). It really is wonderful and I don’t think I’ve heard many people disagree.</p>
<p>Hey, I also got into those three!! But, I am a science/ biz guy. For you, Brown is the way to go due to the amazing English department. Research a little more, but Brown should be the way to go.</p>
<p>You will be well-served by any of those three schools, and should choose based on fit rather than minor perceived differences in English department. You are unlikely to exhaust the curriculum at any one of them.</p>
<p>However, as a Penn student and English minor, I can tell you something about Penn’s:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>of the three listed, it is the highest ranked: #4, tied with Harvard and Columbia. Penn’s department is home to several of the top scholars in English and comparative literature.</p></li>
<li><p>it also has a wealth of creative writing, including the famed Kelly Writer’s House: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/education/05writers.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/education/05writers.html</a></p></li>
<li><p>it has by far the widest course selection. For the Fall Semester, the course roster at each of the three schools is as follows:
Dartmouth: 17 courses
Brown: 64 courses
Penn: over <em>100</em> available courses, including 23 creative writing courses</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Let me know if you have anymore questions.</p>
<p>Then go to Penn. Be a Penn15 with me!!!</p>
<p>Penn is good for business other than that it isn’t better for undergraduate anything compared to brown. Especially when it comes to liberal arts.</p>
<p>^^ I say this as a brown reject knowing full well what I’m missing out on</p>
<p>There are like 4 or 5 restaurants/bars in Hanover, total. Keep in mind the place in which you will be living.</p>
<p>If I were in this situation, I would choose Penn.</p>
<p>@Kylerblood - while I wouldn’t say Brown is significantly worse than Penn when it comes to the quality of undergraduate instruction and breadth (in the humanities and otherwise), the data I provided are unequivocal in their evaluation of Penn’s English department as absolutely stellar.</p>
<p>So when you say something like this:
[quote]
Penn is good for business other than that it isn’t better for undergraduate anything compared to brown. Especially when it comes to liberal arts. /
[quote]
</p>
<p>It strikes me as willfully ignorant at best, and the intentionally inflammatory rhetoric of the grudge holding rejectee at worst (i.e., “How could someone turn down Brown when I wasn’t even accepted?”).</p>
<p>Penn’s other major humanities - history, anthropology, and sociology - are also ranked within the top 10 or top 5 nationally. So it would seem that, beyond business, Penn actually does have some very strong programs.</p>
<p>Brown also offered 23 creative writing courses fall semester and 21 creative writing courses spring semester of this academic year. (Literary Arts Dept.) Not sure if that’s included in your 64-course count. (And those figures are not counting the multiple sections of each course offering–for example, fiction is offered at about 5 or 6 different times, but I only counted it once.)</p>
<p>For Brown, given only the classes that were offered by Comparative Literature, English and Literary Arts (according to Mocha, counting only those undergraduate courses with actual times, so not courses that were supposed to be, but weren’t, offered, and not research/thesis classes)</p>
<p>For Spring 2011
Comp Lit: 20
English: 39
Lit Arts: 20</p>
<p>Total for Spring: 79</p>
<p>For Fall 2011 (only courses with times on mocha, not counting duplicates from the spring)
Comp Lit: 15
English: 35 (+ overlap of 4)
Lit Arts: 14 (+ overlap of 7)</p>
<p>Total for Fall: 64 unique (75 including overlap)</p>
<p>So, given courses that would normally fall under an english department, we have 143 or so unique courses offered each year (not counting remedial english courses). When you can only take a maximum of 10/year, you’d get to explore less than 10% of our offerings, or ~30% over your career (if you ONLY ever took lit courses, which is unlikely to happen).</p>
<p>Comparing that to our CS Department: as a CS concentrator in a VERY good department, we only offer ~19 individual CS courses per semester. So I could actually come close to exhausting the department if I only took CS courses. But I really only have the capacity to take 2 or so per semester, so I won’t be able to take every CS class I want to (because most of them I would like to eventually be able to take). Basically, once a department offers enough courses, arguing based solely on numbers (look! We offer 3000 english courses! hence we’re better than Penn!) becomes silly. AS better way is to look at the classes offered, see which seem more appealing, or whose professors you’d most want to work with, etc.</p>
<p>Or base it off of the group of courses you’ll take the most of while in school: the non-concentration courses.</p>
<p>It should be a matter of fit–at the undergrad level, both Brown and Penn’s departments will educate you equally well. It’s the rest of the campus, the curriculum (or lack thereof), the community, the city that should influence you.</p>
<p>Are you a small city (brown) or a big-ish city (penn) person? or total rural outdoorsy type (dartmouth)</p>
<p>What’s more appealing to you, having no curricular requirements (brown)? Or being able to take courses in schools of law, business, comm, education, etc (penn)? Or having the absolute most attention for undergrads (dartmouth)?</p>
<p>Penn > Brown</p>
<p>Though Brown will more than likely offer the better college experience, probably the best experience among all of the Ivy League schools. Penn however will probably more than likely offer the better education and job opportunity.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses!</p>
<p>I’m a New Yorker. Brown’s open curriculum and relaxed atmosphere certainly appeal to me. But at the same time, I find UPenn’s sheer greater size alluring – more people to meet, sports to watch, parties to crash. </p>
<p>It’s down to Penn and Brown. IvyLeaguer11, what’s your take on Penn’s distribution reqs? Burdensome or worthwhile?</p>
<p>^ you should probably post in the Penn board to get more opinions. If you post here, you’ll most likely get primarily Brown students.</p>
<p>That being said (I go to Brown), I think you should pick your school based on fit. Both are awesome schools, and it should come down to where you’ll be happiest. You won’t have a *<strong><em>ty academic experience at one over the other, but you could potentially have a *</em></strong>ty social one.</p>
<p>In the end requirements were a net positive. Most of them I filled in the course of choosing my own classes on the needs of my major and interests, and the handful that I had to take to meet requirements were either useful (statistics to meet a quant requirement) or genuinely interesting (psychology to meet a sciences requirement, art history to meet the arts & letters requirement). I know I wouldn’t have taken these courses unless I was essentially forced to, but I’m glad I did.</p>
<p>Of course perhaps the Brown student is just so creative and open-minded and wonderful that the art history student just decides to take a course in statistics or psychology or macroeconomics, but then again I doubt all of them are.</p>
<p>^It’s true not all of us are that creative and open-minded. If you have to be forced by requirements to take classes that you aren’t sure will be interesting but you think you’ll want to know, then Brown may not be the place for you. If you truly don’t want to take classes outside a certain subset, that’s a legitimate reason to come here (though I don’t agree with that attitude).</p>
<p>On the other hand, the majority of Brown students will take enough diverse classes to meet most schools’ gen ed requirements. It’s nice knowing, though, that you don’t have to feel pressured to pick among a certain subset of classes just because you have to in order to graduate.</p>
<p>A sampling of the classes taken by me and my close friends this semester:
CS concentrator 1: Physics, CS, CS, Math
Chem concentrator: Biochem, Polish History, Inorganic, US Healthcare
Sociology: Bio, Soc, Philosophy, Poetry
CS concentrator 2: CS, CS, Polish History, Philosophy
History concentrator: British history, Cold War, Macro, US Healthcare
Comparative Lit concentrator: Playwriting, Finance, Dante, Econ</p>
<p>^A few of them are taking 5 but I can’t remember their 5th classes…</p>
<p>I’ll give an example of my classes as well. Good idea. I’m a potential Bio/Music concentrator, by the way.</p>
<p>First semester: Chem, Music Theory, Sociology (FYS), Biotech, Orchestra.
Second semester: Chem, Music theory, Psych, Stats, Orchestra.</p>
<p>Over 90% of Brown students, and nearly 100% of Brown students in the physical sciences take a course of study which would satisfy the distribution requirements of most schools as of about 2008 (the most recent data I’m personally familiar with).</p>