<p>those rankings are based heavily on graduate programs, brown has little in that regard. you should care about undergrad since you will be, a, you know, undergrad.</p>
<p>penn doesn’t even have an undergraduate neuroscience program. they have a biological basis of behavior program (not department) and a neurobiology focus in the biology department. Brown has an entire department dedicated to neuroscience, in addition to its entire department dedicated to cognitive and linguistic science (including cognitive neuroscience). </p>
<p>What Penn has is a GRADUATE program in neuroscience. GRADUATE. Seriously kid. Do your research.</p>
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So essentially you’re claiming Brown can have a fantastic undergrad program despite a weak graduate program, again with little evidence to support your claim. </p>
<p>My goodness, by that thinking I can claim that Pomona has an even more amazing program. After all, it has “little in the way” of graduate programs. </p>
<p>Your attempt to wave away rankings based on Brown’s size makes little sense. Brown has several science departments ranked in the top 15-20 (math, computer science, geology). What makes neuroscience different? After all, you just finished boasting that it’s an entire department.</p>
<ol>
<li>pomona has a great program, but i am not creating a system of comparison, grad = small, undergrad = better. i think that’s obvious.</li>
<li>let’s see, i went to tulane my freshman year. you didn’t get to go to a neuroscience class until sophomore year. at brown, you get a neuroscience class geared towards undergrads taught by senior faculty with the book they wrote from the get go. brown is the only school to have had a partnership with NIH in neuroscience research, neuroscience is year in year out one of the most popular majors (people tend to flock towards good things), brown has 2 other neuro related majors, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, not to mention the brain and behavior track in the biology department. Brown, unlike virtually every other program out there, lets you almost entirely craft your neuroscience curriculum from the entire set of brown course offerings instead of a small list of acceptable courses creating the kind of neuroscience major you personally want to study, instead of the one the school wants you to study. Because the major is lodged in a department instead of a program, it has faculty dedicated strictly to neuroscience instead of faculty borrowed from biology and psychology creating more opportunities for research, more courses to choose from, and more focused advising. Furthermore, Brown does not have a weak grad program (it has a great one), it has a small program. Small programs are often penalized for numbers. numbers of faculty (without taking into account ratio), numbers of dollars, etc. </li>
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<p>did I mention I’m NOT a neuro major?</p>
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See, that’s sort of what I was looking for.</p>
<p>Honestly, I’m not trying to bash Brown. I was just puzzled why so many people speak so highly of the department.</p>
<p>well you’re coming at that question with a very negative and skeptical angle, that’s what people are going to think</p>
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</p>
<p>Learn to heed your own advice, honeycakes. Do you remember saying this:</p>
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</p>
<p>Actually, it does. In addition to the two neuroscience-y majors you listed, you can also major in COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE.</p>
<p>No, you can’t, honeycakes. </p>
<p>You can major in computer and cognitive science
[Penn:</a> Find Academic Programs](<a href=“http://www.upenn.edu/aps/?level=&schoolID=&query=cognitive+neuroscience]Penn:”>http://www.upenn.edu/aps/?level=&schoolID=&query=cognitive+neuroscience)</p>
<p>furthermore COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE…is not neuroscence. </p>
<p>seriously, why do i care, i’m an art major</p>
<p>Look at the track in the major:
[Institute</a> for Research in Cognitive Science](<a href=“http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/education/ba-cogsci.shtml#track]Institute”>http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/education/ba-cogsci.shtml#track)</p>
<p>It’s called cognitive neuroscience.</p>
<p>Cognitive neuroscience is a separate discipline and in fact, at Brown it exists as a separate concentration from neuroscience and is offered in a totally different department.</p>
<p>pwned. </p>
<p>that is all…</p>
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<p>There isn’t any first-mover advantage, as this is not a brand new field where there is huge lead time to start something up. Undergraduate cognitive science in all its pre-med, neuro, psych, AI, and linguistics variants is mostly an assembly and re-packaging of components that are on the shelf at any high-ranked university. </p>
<p>Cog sci is also a very trendy interdisciplinary field and most major schools have already jumped on the bandwagon. Once a research school makes cognitive science an area of focus, quality becomes a question of the usual factors like funding, number of labs and courses, size of faculty, number of grad students, quality of allied departments and med schools. There’s also an accelerated learning curve as faculty from schools that have such programs are tapped to start new ones elsewhere. </p>
<p>The exception is the formation of large research institutes, such as at MIT.</p>
<p>" There isn’t any first-mover advantage, as this is not a brand new field where there is huge lead time to start something up. Undergraduate cognitive science in all its pre-med, neuro, psych, AI, and linguistics variants is mostly an assembly and re-packaging of components that are on the shelf at any high-ranked university."</p>
<p>Not really. I’m not saying it’s a race, but long established programs are usually good ones.
Not at all. cog science, neuro, psych, AI, linguistics, are all very different fields (with the exvception of neuro and psych depending on what you classify as psych). In other words, cog sci in no substitute for any of those other disciplines. none of them are.
If you are worried about the quality of cog sci at Brown, um…don’t, because it’s a very well funded well establsihed department, and we’re building a big new fancy schmmmmancy mind brain center</p>
<p>Brown doesn’t tap departments and then start new ones</p>
<p>siserune-- I disagree on the “first mover” advantage.</p>
<p>One of the points of pride that MIT can point to is that many undergraduate institutions nationwide base their courses on the course that was developed at MIT. At Brown, one area where we have a similar pride is in undergraduate neuroscience, where we were early/first movers in developing a coherent curriculum and course offerings, and where our courses and textbooks are used. Now, simply being the originators may only count for a little, but I think the fact that these original movers are still teaching the introductory neuroscience class at Brown is not a trivial point. Brown happens to have a faculty that has been engaged in the development and refinement of undergraduate neuroscience (from a teaching and curricular perspective) since the beginning, and those same faculty members who are so invested in developing these programs are still around.</p>
<p>I think it’d be utterly biased nonsense to suggest that learning from people who are active leaders in engaging and formulating a curriculum is not better than learning from the average, or even above average person in the field. Our commitment to undergraduate curriculum in this area and the brain power at Brown committed to these issues IS a meaningful advantage for undergraduates looking for neuroscience.</p>