Hi! I’m really interested in Brown, so I was wondering if any current students or alumni help me get a feel for the atmosphere there(because I haven’t gone on a campus tour) 
Thanks!
Also, I just had some questions
I have also heard that Brown likes their applicants to be dichotomous, unlike some other top tier schools who look at excellence in one area. Does that ring true?
hey! I’m in the class of 2022.5 at brown right now. I’m going to be proposing an independent concentration in the fall, probably somewhere around “self v. other”/“deconstructing binaries”/“relativity studies” – something having to do with identity construction in the lens of cross-disciplinary theory/philosophy.
I love brown so much, I’m so happy I chose this school. the open curriculum is amazing (if you’re the type of person who won’t get lost in it) - most people who go to brown have really interdisciplinary interests so distribution requirements would really just get in the way of their academic exploration, at least in my experience. I think what you said about applicants being multifaceted in their interests is very true - I applied with a strong background in both robotics and creative writing and wrote my essay about the intersection between a Wordsworth poem and artificial intelligence. Among my friends, one is doubling in international relations and MCM (basically film), one is a musician and a biomedical engineer, one is a German concentrator and an actress/performer/poet, another is a biologist and a poet, etc etc. that’s what’s so frickin awesome about brown - people are so cool and so passionate about what they do! also, because of the open curriculum and just the general vibe it’s much more collaborative than competitive here (at least in my admittedly humanities-leaning experience, but also it was very collaborative in my STEM classes as well).
in my experience, brown just feels like…home. people care about their academics but generally not in a pretentious way – people are generally pretty chill. brown undergrad is the perfect size where whatever crowd you want to be in you can find - not too small where you feel suffocated, and not too big where you feel totally lost. also if you’re looking to go to a school where people are all about the frat culture and sports and tailgating this definitely isn’t it - I don’t know anyone who goes to brown sports games to be honest. also it’s very liberal.
apart from my fellow classmates, who I think are absolutely amazing, the professors at brown are incredible. I can honestly say that every professor I’ve had here genuinely cared about their students and was at brown to actually teach, not for some research opportunity that came along with a teaching requirement. I mostly take 10-30 person seminars, but even in my intro physics class freshman year which had 80 students in it, the professor still knew my name and how I was doing personally in the class - we still even say hi to each other in passing!
this is getting really long, but just to address your specific questions really quick-
My top two choices were Brown and UChicago - which I know is crazy, given they have radically different styles. I knew, though, that I wanted to go to a school that had a genuine vibe, where people cared about their academics and wanted to talk about their ideas outside of class; I also wanted to avoid a pretentious/competitive/WASPy vibe. ultimately I went with brown because I didn’t want to have to deal with the distribution requirements at UChicago and I’d also heard that it was super intense there and everyone is negative all the time, but obviously I don’t go there so I don’t know. brown - even though it definitely can be WASPY/elite depending on the crowd - ultimately came across as a really genuine place of learning and growing, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
it’s hard to pinpoint just one experience…at Brown I’ve been a radio DJ, I’ve written about the intersections between queerness and quantum physics, I’ve been in more student film projects than I can count, I’ve actually started to make sense of Jacques Derrida and Fred Moten, I’ve seen Daniel Caesar and Mitski (Brown spring weekend ftw!!), I’ve radically deconstructed so many of my assumptions about the world and continue to do so with each class and each conversation, and I’ve grown into myself as a person. brown is a warm community and an absolute powerhouse of an institution. I am so happy that I go here.
@nycbrownu wow thank you so much! That really helped - I love the fact that everyone I’ve asked about Brown talks about the collaborative nature of the school 