<p>Hi all, I'm completing my app for Stanford, and since all the others students are busy getting there stuff done for the November 1 postmark too, I was wondering if anyone here could help me out by reading my essays. If you could do a quick read through and give me your opinions or suggestions I would be very grateful.
Post here and I'll send you an email.
Thanks,
Sam</p>
<p>Down to the wire huh? I would be happy to read your essay. No conflift of interest as my D is not applying to Stanford. I was an English major at Brown.</p>
<p>Thanks a lot SBmom :)
I sent you a private message.</p>
<p>SB Mom.. I would really appreciate your insight as an English Major at Brown. My D is applying to Brown and will definitely be majoring in English wherever she ends up. Could you tell us about your experience? Thanks!</p>
<p>I absolutely loved Brown's English dept. One point of clarification, they call a "major" a "concentration" at Brown. It is wordy but that's the way it is.</p>
<p>I decided to concentrate in English because I loved the subject, and because during my freshman year an inspiring professor encouraged me to go into the English honors program. The honors program requires a thesis, and it allows you to take very appealing upper-level seminars (virtually all of them have 10-20 students only) with all the best professors & mostly other honors students as classmates. This leads to a nice, intimate group of honors concentrators showing up in many of the same classes. It also means great discussions because everyone is enthusiastic. The seminars I took were uniformly excellent and the profs & courses in the English Dept at large were also wonderful. (One Eng prof of a survey course, Sears Jayne, taught every section himself, and held office hours from 9-5 every day except when teaching a class-- his beautiful lectures frequently left students in tears.) Patricia Caldwell was the professor who urged me to do honors and I will always be grateful to her. She was a superb teacher as well. Elmer Blistein (Shakespeare) was kind, funny, and made the material come alive. Michael Harper (poetry) was so fiercely intelligent and well-read that his students (many of us seniors) felt guilty graduating from college while only knowing a tiny fraction of what he knew!</p>
<p>The requirements for concentrating in English were flexible. My memory may be imperfect, but I recall that you had to do 10 classes in the department across a distribution of time periods, literary forms, or cultures. Certain classes from other departments (Comp Lit, etc) could also apply to an English concentration, and other classes from virtually any department can be applied if you make the case to the 2 professors in charge of your thesis and they approve it. One can also devise one's own major with relative ease. Again, convince two professors the idea has merit and you're in.</p>
<p>Brown is a marvelous place to go to school. Good luck to your daughter. As an alumni interviewer, I know that Brown could admit more than double the number it currently does without reducing their standards at all; this means a great many highly qualified kids just don't make it-- for no good reason. Apply to a few less selective Brown clones, just in case.</p>