Brown vs. UC Irvine Engineering

Colleges and Universities A-Z Brown University
1

<p>So UC Irvine’s math scores are higher than Browns. </p>

<p>A lot of engineer managers say they prefer hiring a UC Irvine engineer than a Brown engineer.</p>

<p>Do you think that ivy league is more than just an athletic conference, and at what point does the dependence on the ivy league status take away from true academic excellence?</p>

2

<p>In general, Brown doesn't weight SAT's as highly in their admissions process as other schools. Brown's median SAT range is by far the largest in the ivy league. </p>

<p>Brown is also not a hardcore engineering school (there is not a large amount of big engineering research pulling in lots of money). People do engineering at Brown because they want to be at Brown, and benefit holistically from the unique resources of the Brown learning environment. These resources can be many things and have different value to different people. If you are only interested in Engineering, you may be better off at Irvine, particularly if you are in state and tuitition is cheaper--or better yet, apply to schools like MIT. However, if you have other academic or extracurricular interests and would like to pursue them at a high level along with Engineering you may want to consider Brown.</p>

3

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<p>Does Brown have any top 10 ranking departments? I remember that their English program had a top 10 ranking at some point, but I believe that was about it. What kind of learning environment can be produced without a top 10 ranking department?</p>

4

<p>Brown might not be the best place for you, or any of the other Ivy League schools whose forums you've posted on to disparage and contrast with random UC schools. Are you choosing between UCSD and Dartmouth or Irvine and Brown? </p>

<p>Incidentally, neither Dartmouth or Brown have many top ranked departments because their grad schools are small and rankings measure size of research funding, volume of papers and citations, and other measures that favor large grad schools. Amherst, Swarthmore, and Williams wouldn't appear on any departmental rankings lists, but all three are incrediblly prestigious and have great "learning environments".</p>

<p>Yeah, but either way, you seem like you'd be better off elsewhere.</p>

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<p>lol cold dcricle. oh so cold. :P</p>

6

<p>Maybe, but he's right. The most important factor in whether or not you'll like a school is if it feels right. California1600 obviously has a better feeling about the UC system than Brown, and he'd probably be happier at whichever UC school he chooses to go to than Brown for that reason.</p>

<p>California1600, I do wonder why you bothered to post to the Brown forum. Were you trying to convince all of us to apply to UC instead? Do you want people to abandon Ivy League schools en masse in favor of California schools? (You don't just favor state schools, considering your preference for Stanford and USC over Brown and Dartmouth.)</p>

<p>Considering that you've said, in other conferences, that Brown graduates will say that the best thing about their school is the "Ivy League pedigree", that the whole world knows that USC is better than Brown, and that "Brown is the color of toilet water", the most natural conclusion is that you're just trying to start an argument.</p>

<p>The UC system has over 200,000 students; Brown has about 5,000 undergrads, 1,500 or so grads, and 330 medical students. If you want the world to choose UC over Brown, you've won. People (like you) often make the mistake of assuming that Brown and Dartmouth are universities like Harvard and Columbia. They're really just big liberal arts colleges that happen to have many of the resources that major universities have, except those resources are fully available to undergrads. Most people whose first choice is Brown also apply to a bunch of LACs. The most common school that people who apply to Brown also apply to isn't Harvard, Yale, or Princeton; it's Swarthmore.</p>

<p>My point in all this is that if you have philosophical objections to undergraduate-centered schools, or reasons why you think nobody should apply to Brown, we don't want to hear them. Brown isn't the school for everyone, and I wouldn't want it to be—part of what attracts me to it are the students who would simply be too weird for HYP—but it is the school for someone, and if you disagree, posting it in the Brown conference is just going to make a lot of people mad.</p>

7

<p>OK. But if the dean of engineering at Brown reads this, and poaches a top notch Engineering professor and other top science professors because of this concern, that ability and need to self evaluate and push to self improve rather than depend on ivy league status is something that will benefit current and future Brown students. This is something perhaps that you do not realize. As much as we can talk about this Karl Rove style, the fact of the matter is that as time goes by, universities put less emphasis on improving academic excellence, and more time in defending stagnant positions.</p>

8

<p>What? Did anybody else follow that?</p>

9

<p>California1600 is a troll, please don't feed him/her by responding.</p>

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<p>yeah, i know, i shouldn't have, i'm sorry. :P</p>

11

<p>Here:</p>

<p>Brown needs to improve its departments. So do a lot of other schools, but not all of them are hampered by a dependency on Ivy League status. is that clear enough? Great.</p>

<p>BTW, you guys are the trolls, because you don't want for Brown to improve its own departments.</p>

12

<p>You have provided exactly zero evidence to support your claim. Secondly, Ruth Simmons is currently in the process of expanding the faculty by 100 new members and, at the start of this academic year, Brown's faculty was the largest in its' history. Third, as DC has pointed out, Brown has a culture much closer to a LAC than many a doctoral university. Fourth, If the departments are so weak, How do you explain the nearly 100% acceptance rate to B-Schools, 92-95% to law schools and a similar number to med schools? Fifth, Brown is listed as #14 on the happiest student list...Dartmouth which has much more in common with a LAC as well. This is a crazy conversation...both schools rock...Okay? Do you feel validated?</p>

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<p>Oh ok. I get it now. I guess I never looked at it that way. Brown is hampered by its dependency on Ivy League status, and we're trolls because we don't "want for brown to improve its own departments". That really just speaks for itself. If only I would have thought to transfer earlier.</p>