<p>I’m wondering what the class sizes are like at Brown for someone interested in the natural sciences.
Can some science majors give me examples from their classes?
Thanks</p>
<p>Since no one has answered you so far, I’ll take a stab at it, even though my son is not a science concentrator. He is a freshman with eclectic interests – so far, he’s taken classes in English. Literary Arts (journalism), Modern Culture and Media, Education, Music, and Political Science. The largest class had 500 students, which I understand is fairly rare – it’s an extremely popular class called City Politics. It divides into discussion sections once or twice a week, led by a TA, and so far, he’s found the TAs to be outstanding. He also had a class of 50 that had separate discussion sections. His other classes have ranged from freshman seminars of only 12 students, I believe, to others with 20 to 30 students. I think his improvisational music class had about a dozen kids. All in all, he has felt he has excellent access to his professors (they respond to e-mails, are available for questions, etc.), and there’s plenty of interaction in class. He loves Brown!</p>
<p>Most of my classes are significantly larger than I expected.</p>
<p>My Latin class this semester is 7, which I expected; last semester I was in a class of 16, which I feel like is a lot for Latin.</p>
<p>200 kids in my Chemistry class, one of three sections.</p>
<p>400 in Neuroscience.</p>
<p>30 in Math, one of three sections.</p>
<p>150 in History.</p>
<p>80 in Sociology.</p>
<p>300 in Economics.</p>
<p>Oh, the joys of humanities classes 
(I know you didn’t ask for humanities courses, but the title of your thread may draw some potential humanities concentrators here, so I’ll provide class sizes for my courses anyway…)</p>
<p>First Semester:
18 in Theatre
36 in Dance
15 in American Civilizations
170 in Sociology</p>
<p>Second Semester:
6 in Theatre
36 in Sociology
36 in English
19 in English</p>
<p>First semester:
60 in Physics
12 in lab
30 in Calc
50 in CS
70 in Anthro</p>
<p>Second Semester:
30 in CS
120 in CS
40 in Cogs
Everyone and their mother in City Politics
16 in Lit</p>
<p>The thing with class size is that I’m finding the best professors tend to teach larger classes (at least at the intro level), and so I got a lot more out of my physics class than my math class (if you can choose to take a class with prof. Valles, do it. He’s Bill Nye for college students, and he CARES, more even than 95% of my HS teachers).</p>
<p>^^ Ditto on Valles! I’m a social science concentrator and it was still totally worth it to take Physics 7. Plus, for those who are concerned about class sizes, he led discussion sections himself.</p>
<p>My experience has been that intro science classes are generally larger than intro humanities classes (such as any exist), and I can’t speak to class sizes in upper level science courses but I think they get smaller.</p>
<p>My largest class has been 135 in applied math; my smallest has been 10 (Classical Greek). Computer science has ranged from 30 to 80, pure math has been around 30 both terms I have taken it, and applied math was, as I said, 135 one term, and 18 the other term. So it varies widely, especially depending on level.</p>
<p>For humanities people, my humanities (language) classes have ranged from 10 to 25 (25 being a survey course including about 10 graduate students that’s required for a couple concentrations).</p>