<p>Hi. I am a junior. I am looking at the following schools:</p>
<p>Amherst
Brown
Dartmouth
Northwestern
Wash U St. Louis
Williams</p>
<p>I had a few questions…</p>
<p>1) Which of these schools have good professor/student relationships? (i.e. professors invite students to their houses for dinner, students know professors personally, etc)</p>
<p>2) Which of these schools have small class sizes? (like under 30 people since I like discussion-based classes rather than lecture-based)</p>
<p>3) Which have better campuses? (in particular, I like green campuses that are centralized)</p>
<p>4) At which of these schools is pretentiousness a problem?</p>
<p>5) Are people generally “normal” at these schools? (I know normal is a very subjective word, but I mean like at University of Chicago they are not normal)<—not saying this is a bad thing by the way ;)</p>
<p>Thank you all so much for the help! I will answer any threads you want :)</p>
<p>I suggest you spend some time reading reviews of Brown by other students, in college guides at your bookstore and on this forum. Most importantly, visit Brown. Take time to talk to current students, sit in on a few classes, maybe do an overnight in a dorm (write admissions a few months before.)</p>
<p>1) When I went to go visit campus my tour guide said she had gone over professors’ houses and that they even take students out to dinner at Brown.
2) My tour guide also said that only 1% of classes have over 40 students and that if they do have over 40 students they have to break up into discussion groups of 20. Very discussion based.
3) Brown’s campus was beautiful and very centralized only a seven minute walk to anywhere from the center of campus.
4) All of the student’s seemed really laid back and down to earth when I went to Brown.
5) Well the art school is like 2 blocks from Brown so you got some weird artsy people but for the most part everyone seemed pretty normal.</p>
<p>I’m not sure about the other schools but this is what I learned about Brown during my visit hope this helps></p>
<p>1) Yes, my advisor did in fact take me out to lunch once. But it’s not like anything meaningful happened.
2) Only my math class has less than 40 students. And I’m not sure 35 is the number you’re looking for. And REQUIRED to break into sections? My computer science and physics classes don’t (unless you count labs as sections, which are clearly different things).
3) Unless you live in Perkins. Then tack on an extra 5.
4) I’m glad you thought so. We like to think so, then we learn we do have to study. And for the majority of kids on campus, the first few weeks seems to wipe away most pretentiousness. When you learn everyone’s better than you at everything.
5) I’m pretty sure Brown has a requirement that in order to get in you must be weird. I’ve yet to meet someone I can tag as “normal.”</p>
<p>Now, not to turn you off, but this is what I’ve gotten during my first semester in a science-type track. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it here. The weather is starting to get nice and cold, the people are all quirky and unique, there’s always someone to work with on homework, my dorm is extremely social, I can walk everywhere on campus, and a few of my professors are amazing.</p>
<p>The coursework, for me anyways, is DIFFICULT. A lot of effort goes into my classes, and I’m definitely not getting the grades I was hoping for going into the semester. However, if you get into a good first year seminar, you’ll get some really fun discussion, and I’ve heard from people who do humanities-type-courses that philosophy and literature type courses have fun discussions. I’ve just not experienced it personally.</p>
<p>Labs and problem sessions are considered sections, both of which exist for physics (and the TA access you have in intro CS classes creates more personalization than just about course I’ve taken at Brown).</p>
<p>I don’t really know how you’re defining weird or normal-- I think Brown is pretty comparable to our peers except we’re more skewed toward hipster rather than preppy.</p>
<p>Class size at Brown is mostly in your control. Sciences start large (and is where you see most of hte large lectures) but get extremely small, fast. By the second semester of my sophomore year every science class I was in had fewer than 25 and most had fewer than 12. It varies based on your field and personal choices, however.</p>
<p>My first two semesters at Brown I had 6 courses with less than 25 students out of 8 and I was a chemistry concentrator without a first-year seminar. YMMV.</p>
<p>Those are the standard myths that all schools tell on their tours. Here is how to translate it into real terms (which are true for most schools, not just Brown):</p>
<p>Tour guides and other student representatives are a self-selected group who are also selected by the school. They are the students likeliest to have met their professors, had great undergrad experiences, and be rah-rah cheerleaders for the school. </p>
<p>“Invited to professor’s house” most often refers to professors who are paid dormitory supervisors. That is, professors (and their spouses) who get free housing provided by the university, with funding for student social hours at said housing, to be hosted by the professor as part of the job requirement of being a dorm master. That aside, at any wealthy university the professors and academic departments have an annual budget for sponsored student-faculty interaction such as throwing parties at the end of the term, taking students to lunch, bringing lunch or other catering in to seminars, and so on. Some professors will use more of that money than others and a few will go further and invite their classes over to prof’s house. Individual invitations for undergrads to lunch or dinner are less common in part because of the potential appearance of impropriety (favoritism, sexual harrassment, etc). This doesn’t apply if you are in an individual supervised-reading course or other project with a specific advisor, and in that case it would be common to discuss material in a restaurant or cafe. </p>
<p>In short, I would expect Brown to have less of these professor invitations than a small LAC and as much or more as at schools of comparable wealth and student-faculty ratio. Most one on one interaction with professors is at office hours and over e-mail, not dinner.</p>
<p>For the class sizes, every school will downplay the number of large classes by reporting the percentage of huge classes instead of the percentage of time per student, spent in large classes. For example, if there are just eight huge classes but every student takes one such class per semester then every student is spending 25 percent of their time in a giant lecture hall with hundreds of students. It is not within a student’s control which courses are popular or required, so unless you specifically opt for the more obscure subjects, chances are that lots of other students will take a lot of the courses you take for the same reasons you will, and this will drive up some of the enrollments beyond the scale of a small/cozy seminar. Again, this is true at all schools. Alternatively, where enrollments are limited, there will be competition for the courses taught by the better instructors, with students frequently being locked out of the seminars they want (this happens at LACs).</p>
<p>None of the times I was counting as being at a professor’s home (or going to lunch with them) was part of the few bucks given to advisors to get pizza with advisees or a part of the faculty fellows programs, and at least half of those times it was an entire class event and not just me being an active student getting to meet with them.</p>
<p>But of course, I know nothing about the experience here because I’m just a student who graduated in May and I must be lying because I have something to be lying about.</p>
<p>At Brown, students are rarely locked out of all but a few very popular classes-- the intro to fiction/non-fiction in the literary arts and English departments, VA10, and TA10 (or 11 can’t remember) are the only ones that come to mind as perpetual offenders. Other than that, the unwritten rule that if you show up three times you’ll be in the class still seems to apply.</p>
<p>Of course, at Brown, since you can take anything you want outside of your concentration, there is no way to describe percentage time per student spent in large classes because there is no common student course experience.</p>
Course size and course structure are often unrelated. I have been in a lecture class with 6 students and a discussion class with 35. </p>
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Agreed.</p>
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Personal preference. I personally think WUStL has the prettiest campus of those on your list, with tidy quads and collegiate gothic architecture. </p>
<p>Brown is a mixed bag. In terms of landscaping, it’s nothing to write home about; it’s a fairly cramped campus. Architecture ranges from extremely beautiful (Robinson hall) to eyesores (Rockefeller library).</p>
<p>i.e., you don’t dispute the correctness of anything I wrote.</p>
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<p>i.e., individual invitations are less common, as I noted. </p>
<p>The funding for professors and departments is not just pizza-for-advisees money, by the way. I think you do know that, but don’t necessarily know how many of those lunch receipts (I hope it was the profs who paid) were passed along to the departmental Central Omnibus Largesse Fund For Feeding/Bribing Of Hungry Students. At any rate, every school comparable to Brown has plenty of opportunities (most of them officially funded) for students and faculty to eat together or meet outside of purely academic settings. To the extent the tour guide implied this is a special feature of Brown, he/she was misleading.</p>
<p>Also, aren’t you one of those super-involved types who become the tour guides, the student delegates on university committees, the admissions reps in CC and so forth (you’re currently near 4000 postings promoting Brown on this board, and counting)? I understand that this makes you a better informed source in some ways, but it also makes you a biased source. I think the facts about Brown are, in general, favorable enough on their own that your personal services as “spin doctor” to a multibillion-dollar entity are not necessary. </p>
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<p>Is this really about you personally? See above. </p>
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<p>Lockouts, as I wrote, tend to happen at small schools with numerous limited-enrollment seminars, i.e., LACs.</p>
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<p>The registrar can instantly produce that percentage. You count up the courses weighted by the number of students to get the average class size experienced per student per semester.</p>
The question was being invited to professor’s homes. Whether Brown is uniquely strong in this, I have no opinion. Only that it’s not an infrequent occurrence at all.</p>
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In some senses, which is why I mentioned these were often class invitations, not personal to me. The way these interactions most often happen is in smaller classes or lab groups, etc.</p>
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Sure, but it’s not just one number you’d want to see. My point is that the mean will not be useful because the spread will be huge at Brown because there is no common experience. I know you hate the idea that data is useless sometimes, but again, this is an instance where providing a mean would not actually provide any descriptive information about what’s going on. Not only does this kind of thing vary by subject area, it also varies by priority. I’m an organic chem major and in my first year I took 6 classes out of 8 with fewer than 25 students. Is that the most common path? Not necessarily, but Brown’s curriculum allows for student priority to take precedent over some averages. It’s just as easy to do what I did as it is to take 8 classes larger than 100 in your first year.</p>
<p>So it’s not necessarily about percentage, it’s at least a little bit about barriers to having various experiences, and it’d be quite easy to show that there is a huge range/variation in that number, and that range/variation may be predictable across various elements. What confuses the issue even more at Brown is that student priorities are the main difference, and probably has more of an effect than even subject area (offering myself as the example that proves the exception).</p>
<p>So basically, you’re calling for a piece of information that may make sense when a large portion of your time is prescripted, but since students are not locked out and don’t have requirements, they choose to flow into classes based on their priority. Size, as a result, is a huge mish-mash.</p>
<p>Compared to as- or more-urban peer schools, Brown has a bit more faculty who live along students’ walking paths to and around the campus. Also, Louis’ is an effectively on-campus lunch place that is well suited to small student-faculty outings and doesn’t have an equivalent at other campuses. Those are natural advantages. On the other hand, Brown doesn’t have the kind of residence system found at some of the other schools, with small armies of faculty and grad students attached to particular dormitories and interacting regularly with the undergrads. </p>
<p>re: class sizes, I don’t think an elaborate data analysis is needed to see that it’s misleading to hype up numbers like “only 1 percent of classes are big” when a typical student might spend anywhere from 15 to 60 percent of his class time in those big classes. The first number, the one the schools like to tout, is an irrelevant factoid about the course catalog. The second and much higher number is extremely relevant, because it’s what the student actually will experience. Every school sells this particular bill of goods about class size on their tours, but it’s amazing that they think the visitors are gullible enough to not see through it. </p>
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<p>Weren’t you a bit advanced coming in and thus able to skip some of the intro classes, getting to the advanced (smaller, or grad/seminar/lab style) classes earlier?</p>
<p>re: classes sizes, the data given to tour guides is that just under 75% of classes have 20 students or fewer. The packet then goes on to describe which courses are large and talk about various supports we have in place to make these large classes shrink. I don’t think this is at all misleading. I can’t speak to what an actual tour guide says though. One example I can give is what myself and a co-guide used to say frequently on science tours-- we can barely think of 15 courses that were over 100 students and the vast majority of those courses are some of the best reviewed courses on campus, and many of them are so large due to students loving the class, not needing the class. That was true, and our experience, not connected to a number.</p>
<p>Personally, I think that the small class thing is a bit of a stupid obsession. You can be lectured at with 8 people in the room and it can be terrible. You can be in a lecture of 700 and not want to ever miss even a second in that class. Some subjects lead themselves to seminar style learning, others do not, etc etc.</p>
<p>Re: my having advanced standing.</p>
<p>Brown barely gives credit for any first year science. In chemistry there is no credit, and Chem 33 and 35 were my large classes. In math, my high school only had Calc AB which put me behind many advanced students. I did get out of first semester physics and I chose to take physics my second year anyway, but that would be the only class I got out of somehow, unless you count first semester calc which almost all students get out of at Brown.</p>
<p>I still finished my chemistry concentration in three years (well, one semester of research short).</p>
<p>Pretentiousness-- I suspect that is an eye of the beholder thing. A group of students having an enjoyable conversation about an esoteric subject that interests them might seem pretentious to those left out because they don’t have the background knowledge (or patronizing if the group tries to get the outsider up to speed).</p>
<p>Normal-- kids are normal everywhere. Many drink. Many dance. They study. They stay up late. Many dabble in campus activities. They mostly wear clothes appropriate to the season. They talk about classes. They talk about pop culture. (A tour guide told us this is even true at U Chicago.) What kind of normal are you most comfortable with?</p>
<p>That’s still misleading, though a lot less so than the 1 percent figure given by the other tour guide. The question is not how many of Brown’s courses are (in this example) over 20 students but how many of the courses a typical student takes at Brown are of that size. The second figure is a lot higher because the courses have to be weighted by their enrollment when counting them up. </p>
<p>Suppose, for example, that the larger classes have an average enrollment of 30 students, and the smaller classes have an average size of 10. Then that (slightly more than) 25 percent minority of large classes accounts for (slightly more than) half of the classes taken per student. The Brown students would then, on average, be spending just over half their time in classes of 21 or more students, which is twice the number that the tourguide brochure proposes to convey to the visitors. </p>
<p>You could argue that both types of calculation are informative. True! But the tour isn’t presenting both types of number; it is using the lower number (an academic detail about the course catalog) to conceal the higher number (a very practical detail of interest to prospective students). </p>
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<p>Classes generally don’t “shrink”. “Making large classes shrink” sounds a lot like a spin-controlled description of practices that are standard at most wealthy schools, such as adding sections or splitting some lecture classes into smaller parallel lecture classes. There are tradeoffs with most of those practices (smaller groups versus grad student lecturers, etc).</p>
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<p>That’s precisely the point. Student’s don’t choose classes randomly. If they did, the class size distribution would be pretty flat. But random selection is the course-selection model implied in the figures given by the tour guides (the raw number of large courses; this is only relevant under random selection). What students actually do is cluster into classes that are popular or required. This means that students will be spending their time in any given course in proportion to its size.</p>
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<p>Exactly right. I think the university marketing people are much more obsessed with it than the students.</p>
<p>On the class size thing, something that was a big issue for me (and I chose Brown):</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Here’s a helpful document I just found: <a href=“http://gradschool.brown.edu/resources/directorsgrad_1241185728.pdf[/url]”>http://gradschool.brown.edu/resources/directorsgrad_1241185728.pdf</a></p></li>
<li><p>I think that Brown has a great mix of class sizes. For example, this semester I am in: two entirely discussion-based classes under twenty, intro econ (huge, with less-than-helpful-sections), a mid-size physics lecture where the prof leads the optional sections and learns everyone’s names, and an intro poli sci lecture with great TA-led sections and a prof who always leaves time for questions and encouraged us all to go to her office hours. The result is that I’ve had great interactions with 4 of my 5 professors who all know me by name, and even econ is still a valuable course (there are times when it’s nie to be a little anonymous). There are indeed ways of making these lectures seem smaller.</p></li>
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<p>lfsc…thank you for sharing this link. It was wonderful to see all the classes that Brown offers (in 07/08) and also get a sense of their class sizes. Wow! What a terrific array of courses. Not sure how this compares with other schools, but I sure wish I could go back to college.</p>
<p>I think that it is pretty difficult for students who went to Brown to assess your other schools. Maybe some have toured or have friends there, but they can really only tell you what the experience is like at Brown (she graduated in May.) From what I know of my daughter’s experience:</p>
<p>1) very good exposure to professors, used to hang out in some of their offices just for impromptu discussions. Easy to reach via email. Easy to ask to work with them on research. Easy to get research experience. Never heard about any dinners.</p>
<p>2) had a mix of discussion based and lectures. Smallest class was just 3 in an uper division CS class, until a grad student joined and made it 4. Then she TA’d it and upped enrollment to 5. That was one of the teachers whose office she used to drop by, before she had any class with him. One of the larger classes was the CS intro class w/ Prof Kline and it made such a great impression she switched her major.</p>
<p>3) I like the campus and surrounding area very much. To me it is a great and intimate college location.</p>
<p>4) I think that people who could label groups of 6,000 people as pretentious have a chip or something. The student body is diverse in the extreme. The culture at Brown is cooperative and that resonates through academics and interpersonal dealings. You will find ‘your people.’</p>
<p>5) Can’t tell you normal or not. I was struck by the students ambition and seriousness and ability to overachieve, but they don’t come off as intense as UChi. Brown students can be on the quirky side, but to me that’s a good thing.</p>