What are some departments Brown is known for?
What majors should one attend Brown for, especially over Dartmouth and Duke?
What is the job outlook at Brown in Wall Street companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc?
How good is the CS department at Brown?
You got it all wrong.
Brown University uses an Open Curriculum. The point of this entire system is so you DON’T blindly follow a major.
They want you to dabble in Computer Science while being brave enough to take a course in Contemporary Studies. They want future authors to take courses in engineering. They want politicians to be knowledgeable in environmental science.
I hate to sound poetic, but they just want ideas to clash. That’s why the school’s architecture was specifically designed with the intention to place radically different departments right across from each other.
That’s also why Silicon Valley recruits a lot of kids from Brown (In fact, there’s a Business Insider webpage that shows Brown as being one of the top feeder schools to Silicon Valley). Silicon Valley loves new ideas, and as a result ends up adoring CS students from Brown (due to their abnormally high levels of experience in multiple academic disinclines).
But you could go to Dartmouth (which sends more kids to Silicon Valley than Brown) or Duke (sends even more than Dartmouth) and do some pretty incredible stuff there!
My point is that comparing CS departments from top schools is useless because, to be frank, no decent company from the Valley gives a hoot where you went to school. They rather hire a college dropout that actually created interesting apps than a Duke CS graduate with nothing special in his or her portfolio.
So, if comparing CS departments from top schools is utterly useless, then why should Brown be your pick?
Great question! Brown lets you be more than a CS graduate. The ability to take courses from any department, with no penalty whatsoever, allows you to gather ideas from your political science class, from you healthcare 101 course, from that RISD class on glassblowing, (and etc … ) to create some pretty great apps that one day may change the world.
Brown isn’t known for one department. It’s known for breaking down the whole antiquated labeling system, and instead classifying students by what they want to do. And by ‘what they want to do’, I really mean it. At every other school, students are forced to pick from a list of departments. That’s not Brown’s version of academic freedom. There are departments, but their designed to clash with other departments.
Wall Street Companies do recruit directly at Brown, but not many go into financing because it’s looks down upon. (The world doesn’t need any more Wall Street Bankers, trust me). And you definitely don’t apply or attend Brown for gaining entrance into the financial capital of the world.
TLDR: To create innovative solutions to big problems people forgot existed, one needs to take courses from a wide array of departments to enhance one particular skill set.
I know you didn’t mention Columbia, but for future readers I though i should quickly explain this:
The difference between Brown’s open curriculum and Columbia’s core curriculum is that Brown simply recommends taking courses from different places. Columbia essentially mandates it. But by offering it as a option, people are willing to do it with a higher degree of motivation and classes are always filled with people who actually want to be there.
CS and neuroscience are the real flagship departments (i.e. top 3 in the country).
Other outstanding departments: biology, chemistry, history, classics, econ, literary arts, IR
There are no bad departments at these schools.
The job prospects are excellent (as they are for Dartmouth and Duke). The CS students are highly sought after and all my friends going to wall street/ibanking were landing jobs during the height of the recession.
I’m not really sure what @thenextcolbert is getting at. Brown very much has departments http://www.brown.edu/academics/degree-granting and I don’t think they are “designed to clash with other departments” (what does that even mean?)
The point of the open curriculum is to take ownership of your curriculum. Concentrations still have requirements and depending on which one, more or less requirements (e.g. an AB in classics was 8, an ScB in biology was 20) and more or less specific requirements (e.g. take these courses vs. take 3 advanced courses).
Frankly, I think among Brown, Dartmouth, and Duke, you’d be better off using non academic factors. These are creme de la creme universities but they are very different when you get beyond the caliber of the academics.
I also disagree with “Brown simply recommends taking courses from different places.” Brown doesn’t have an official recommendation and that is the point of the open curriculum. Do you want to take courses from different places? Cool, go for it. You don’t? Cool, don’t. Maybe your courses will look like they’re really different but actually one common theme emerges. Maybe they’ll look really similar but in fact span a wide range of topics. I’d recommend reading this thread if you’re interested in the theory of the open curriculum: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/brown-university/385841-the-brown-curriculum-and-university-college-explained-p1.html
@iwannabe_Brown You are awesome, good sir. Although, I would like to know why you say Brown CS is so good…I mean wouldn’t you agree that MIT, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon SCS at least all have better CS departments?
Not at the undergraduate level
To gain perspective on Brown CS, google Andries van Dam. (I do feel like a broken record on that one.) I wouldn’t say that any of those schools have a “better” CS department. They are all different – and I think the bottom line is that studying CS at any of those schools will lead to success. Among the general public – and that includes CC – Brown’s CS department is not well known and so doesn’t get the kudos it deserves. But CS concentrators at Brown definitely get jobs at all the major companies.
I_wanna does a great job explaining Brown philosophy. I agree that for the most part you should be weighing other factors. (And I also don’t understand a lot of what thenextcolbert is saying.)
I think if you want to live in the south after college, then Duke might have an edge over Brown. Because of sports, Duke has better name recognition. I don’t know enough about Wall Street and Silicon Valley recruiting to know how Duke does there – Brown students do extraordinarily well, assuming they major in the right things (econ, CS, applied math are examples), do well in classes and have a good resume.
@iwannabe_Brown okay can you support that claim, because in my opinion, it is a very bold one
I support it by the fact that the graduate programs in CS at all of those schools are much larger than Brown’s (and garner more institutional priority in particular at MIT, Berkeley and Stanford) and based on the employment and grad school history of Brown undergrads. In particular the voraciousness by which tech companies (Facebook, google, adobe, microsoft, apple, pixar, you name it, etc) descend on campus like the wicked witch’s flying monkeys trying to snatch up all the seniors with their various competing offers. I remember senior year everyone talking about the recession and how hard it was for college grads to find jobs and trying to reconcile that with my CS/finance friends getting actively recruited by all the top companies in their fields and trying to decide which of the multiple offers they were receiving should they accept.
@iwannabe_Brown So what are the average salaries like received by Brown seniors?
You could call career services at all three of these schools and get some numbers, but I think you’ll find they’re pretty much comparable stepping stones to your desired corporate cubicle.
Did @iwannabe_Brown’s advice on non academic factors resonate with you at all? Have you visited the schools, met and spoken with students and professors?
@arwarw It did. My father is not in the country, and my mom wont let me visit by myself. I will visit when I can.
^^^Excellent!
My daughter loves Brown, but spent a weekend with her high school friend at Dartmouth, and didn’t really like it - Conversely, her friend, who is loving Dartmouth, visited Brown and didn’t really like Brown.
She tells me the schools seem quite different socially.
If you have time, these brief clips may give you a little flavor of the Brown experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aNp6bJCAhU
Best of luck with your decision!
@lb43823 You might be under some misunderstanding that Google, for example, pays grads from MIT and Berkeley differently than they pay grads from Brown but that is not the case. If a company recruits and/or hires new grads they pretty much all get the same salary. and those companies you mention will be accessible to you (however if you are an international I can’t speak to employment opportunities for undergrads on OPT and then needing H1B Visa) Occasionally a student might get a bit of a little better offer if you are known as a superstar technically in some area for some reason. Basically Brown has a gem of a CS department with a really great ratio of students to teachers. All the professors that are researching are teaching and working with undergrads. The department is run extremely well and they do undergraduate teaching very well. If you want to do research there are many opportunities.
@BrownParent Yes, thanks for clearing that misunderstanding. It is just that when one looks at what schools are top feeders to the silicon valley, Brown does not appear to make that list.
Is there any reason for this? Could it be because there are simply less Brown CS students?
That’s part of it. Additionally, that diagram makes no mention of what jobs those are. 25% of San Jose state alumni are administrative positions - certainly don’t need a good CS degree to be an executive assistant.
IBM has 100k Indian employees? Doubt they’re all doing jobs that require CS degrees.
Also is that chart undergrad or grad alumni (sorry for additional post. Phone won’t let me edit previous one)
@iwannabe_Brown Good point. I think I just have to have faith that Brown does indeed have a wonderful CS department, as do Duke and Dartmouth. Just because they don’t appear in rankings, does not mean anything, especially if job prospects are as you describe them.
If possible, could you briefly highlight the 5 year masters program, and whether it is worth it to prospective employers, or would you recommend completing a masters at a later time (after work experience) or perhaps from another institution?
@iwannabe_Brown Also, if people go into a graduate program at another institution, is it usually MS or PhD?
I think it is a small class. There were 45 in my dd’s class. In the dept graduation students could announce where they were going and fuly 3/4 were going to MS and Google. The others were going to grad school, research positions, other companies, 2 to teach for america. I do know that Pixar has Brown as a target school but I don’t know of anyone going personally.
http://aimeemajor.com/anim/pixarcollege.html
The 5 yr MS students I knew from my dd mentioning working with them were going on to PhD programs. Mine went to PhD from undergrad, was accepted to several in the 10 to 15 rank. I think doing the 5 year might make you a stronger candidate for a PhD. I think that is something to decide after you are there. You can get info for now from the webpages.
@BrownParent Thanks for information. In general, what are the advantages of completing a PhD in computer science versus not completing one, and going into industry?
And what job opportunities does PhD open up?
I know that this question is probably not meant for this thread, but since we are on the topic, I thought I would just ask, and especially since your daughter is completing her PhD, you might know some valuable information.
Thanks!
