Hello! I am a prospective applicant for Brown and a couple other Ivy league schools, as well as a bunch of liberal arts colleges like Williams or Middlebury. I’m trying to figure out which places are likely to have an atmosphere that prioritizes cooperation over competition. I’ve heard that Columbia is nastily competitive. I’d like to avoid that.
Essentially, can somebody tell me how competitive the Brown student body is with each other, and what that looks like relative to schools of similar stature, like the ones I’ve mentioned? Thanks.
I went to Brown a few decades ago, and one of the things I loved about it was the lack of competition among students. I went to a very competitive high school, and Brown was the opposite experience. Students worked hard for themselves, not to do better than their classmates; they work hard because they want to learn, to be engaged intellectually.
In the decades since I graduated, I’ve had numerous opportunities to interact with current students, and one theme that stayed constant was Brown’s collaborative, non-competitive environment. The one possible exception is pre-med students, who are very grade conscious.
I can’t speak for other colleges. But I have yet to meet a Brown student who complained about competition among students.
I can’t compare it to other schools, but I would categorize Brown as collaborative. A lot of the elements that drive competition are absent here: there’s not a lot of grade deflation, so it’s not like students are competing for the few A’s available in a class. There are no GPAs, so there really isn’t anything numerical to compare. Most classes will have students who are taking it S/NC (Brown’s version of pass/fail), which generally reduces the stress that drives unhealthy competition. On the flip side, students work together all the time, forming unofficial study groups, talking about papers before class, etc. And professors (in my experience) strongly encourage students to seek help when needed. Overall, I’d say Brown is far from cutthroat.
See, that’s what I mean. Thanks, SpringAwake, for confirming that in this way, Brown hasn’t changed and in fact, seems to have gotten better.
Thank you both very much. That helps quite a bit.
Brown doesn’t compute GPAs, but we get As, Bs, and Cs, which you can convert to 4, 3, and 2 and calculate your GPA, which you’ll do for grad/professional school and some internships. Certainly no one I know was going around comparing their GPA to anyone else but those of us pursuing things where it mattered certainly had a sense as to what our own GPA was…
I would say that in 05-09, the pre-med students who identified as “pre-med” are like that (i.e. the ones who mentioned it when you asked what their concentration was either as a substitute for the department or as an add on) while The pre-med students who simply identified as whatever their concentration was were not like that. I have a lot of now doctor friends who I didn’t know were pre-med until senior year when the “what are you doing next year” questions started to pop up.