<p>At Brown, are you able to have a double major and one, possible two, minors?</p>
<p>Double major, yes.
There aren’t any minors at Brown.</p>
<p>There are no minors. The number of concentrations is limited mostly by how many classes you can reasonably take in 4 years. Some people have triple concentrated.</p>
<p>90% of applicants who think double concentrating or having lots of minors is a good idea find out they were wrong within one or two semesters. Another 5% figure it out after 2 years.</p>
<p>The 20% or so of students who end up with double concentrations tend to be made up of about one third folks who thought about doubling at the start, another one third folks who “fell into” their double concentration somewhat by mistake, and one third folks who realized once they were at Brown at some point that what they wanted was a double.</p>
<p>The large number of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary (see hyphenated degrees like CS-Econ) are more than sufficient and often intellectually more coherent than a double.</p>
<p>What modestmelody said.</p>
<p>Brown gives you leeway to just take a bunch of classes that interest you, then wait until 2nd semester of sophmore year to officially declare your major and make a contract with your advisor to outline how that will be fufilled each semester until you graduate. You can always revise the contract, meanwhile.</p>
<p>So if you know your plan right from the start, you can angle for a double major. Brown doesn’t allow for a minor, but you can DIY if you like.</p>
<p>Brown prefers that you explore. As a peer advisor in Computer Science, my daughter was asked to encourage students to explore other areas. She took Mandarin and Russian lang, fiction writing workships etc. She did a Math/CS major so no need to double major.</p>
<p>But I met plenty of students who did double major.</p>
<p>Double concentrating is certainly possible, and admirable in many ways. My daughter double-concentrated. However, you need to decide, by the time you graduate, which concentration will appear in your official papers, and when she graduated, my daughter could only have one. Perhaps that’s changed or will change, but that means that it may not make sense to double or triple concentrate because it does limit the number of other courses you can take, as you must complete requirements in all concentrations. It seems to me that the whole point of going to college, especially one as fabulous as Brown, is to explore many different courses; to be broad in as many ways as possible, rather than going deeper in only a couple. I believe that’s why Brown doesn’t officially recognize double concentrations and has no minors.</p>
<p>Excellent post, franglish.</p>
<p>Franglish,</p>
<p>Unless its changed since 09 (or I was misinformed), the only circumstance where one had to choose an “official” concentration was when one was an ScB and the other was an AB as Brown wants those students to take 5 years but it can be done in 4.</p>
<p>While I agree that brown encourages exploration, I don’t see anything wrong with diving deep in a few areas. I always felt the new curriculum was about empowering students to take control of their education and most likely for the first time in their lives, give them complete control over what they learn. My biology ScB and classics AB left me with only 4 classes that didn’t count towards my concentrations and I ended up using 2 of those 4 on bio and classics anyway (and the other 2 were in cog studies so I really didn’t branch out too much). There are still several bio and classics courses I wish I had gotten to take and I don’t regret that my coursework was so narrow because I simply had no desire to learn about other topics in that kind of setting. I got plenty of Econ, math, history, and international relations from dinner discussions at the ratty.</p>
<p>Folks always seem to get tripped up by Brown’s double concentration policy, in particular regarding what is “official”, what appears on your diploma, etc. I’m a recent graduate with a double concentration (one ScB, one AB), but did not do the 5-year combined AB-ScB program. Brown does recognize double concentrations, and both concentrations are denoted on your TRANSCRIPT (not DIPLOMA; we’ll get to that later). This is true even if one of the concentrations is a ScB and the other an AB, and you are not on the 5-year program, as was the case with me. Now presumably, in such a situation, you would likely want your DIPLOMA to be a ScB (since you can only have one DIPLOMA), as it is probably more requirement-intensive. This is the only sense in which someone in my situation is forced to “choose”, but then again not really because the my AB concentration is right there on my TRANSCRIPT, and that is the document outside folks would be interested in. </p>
<p>If you are on the 5-year program, then you would not have to choose just the ScB for your DIPLOMA. Instead, you receive the combined AB-ScB DIPLOMA (still one diploma, not two). Your TRANSCRIPT will not be materially different from a double concentrator not on the 5-year program.</p>
<p>In all cases, there will be no indication of your concentration/s on your DIPLOMA, unless you have completed honors, in which case it will have the additional line “with honors in whatever concentration” (all in Latin, of course).</p>
<p>Also, it peeves me when folks conflate liberal education at Brown with “broadly sampling courses from as many departments as possible”.</p>