<p>I recently answered a couple of questions for an article to be written about the Task Force on Undergraduate Education and I thought that posting my answers to these questions on here may be useful to some people.</p>
<p>My other thread can be read here:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/brown-university/385841-brown-curriculum-university-college-explained.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/brown-university/385841-brown-curriculum-university-college-explained.html</a></p>
<p>Anyway…</p>
<p><em>In your personal experience, how has the Brown curriculum worked? What are the benefits and drawbacks of not having the distribution requirements that are found at most other colleges?</em>
I think the Brown Curriculum is fantastic. The lack of distribution requirements, along with a pervasive culture which supports personal responsibility and individualized learning, completely changes what a Brown student experiences. Competition amongst students is lowered dramatically because its rare that two students have similar schedules or similar motivations.
I have the ability to organize my education in a way that is coherent for my own goals. For example, I’ve taken courses which were actually anthropology, history, sociology, archeology, a language which all fell under the same undergraduate program-- Judaic studies. While at many institutions taking so many courses outside of my concentration would have been looked at as narrowing my studies, I was able to construct a liberal education which allowed me to explore several disciplines organized topically around a personal interest. That experience may not be appreciated elsewhere.
The navigation and creation of an individualized curriculum has also been essential to my own intellectual growth. I had no interest in or real understanding of the concept of a liberal arts education when I came to Brown. The Open Curriculum was just an appealing way to lower red tape and allow me to explore the many interests I had. However, now, at Brown, being responsible for my own curricular path has forced me to engage my education. I am far more active participant in defining what it means to be educated than I ever would have been at another school. While I do not object to the notion that a college education requires exploration outside of one’s comfort zone and should involve various subject areas, had I simply been given a prescription for my education at the start of my first-year I would have viewed general education has a meaningless checklist. Now I’ve been forced to consider what my education means, how my courses connected, how it is, in fact, that my stumbling through courses based on my personal interest that I managed to construct a strong liberal arts education.
The weakness, if any, is that the Brown common experience is a lack of common experience. Many students at other universities will often claim that they come together as members of a community around their common general education “experience” (I often think “experience” in this case is a euphemism for “woes”). Here at Brown the culture is unified around the actions we take out of the classroom. The result is something that is quite powerful-- educational experiences outside of the classroom are often at the forefront of a Brown student’s experience rather than the background. However, this results in a more fractured student body where groups are often smaller and fractured more purely along the lines of extracurricular interests. We don’t lose any of our love for Brown, and we certainly love to talk about shopping period and course selection with any of our peers, but the lack of a consistent core does create for a weakening of institutional memory because alumni had remarkably different experiences than current students. In fact, many current students have remarkably different experiences from their peers. I don’t think the result is a lack of unity, but rather, a very different kind of unity on campus that’s far harder to capture and define.</p>
<p><em>What role has advising played in your academic experience so far? Do you think the task forces updated advising recommendations will have a significant effect on students?</em>
My advising experience has been excellent. I sought out advisors as mentors, not information caches. I have found that both of the advisors I’ve had formally, professors I’ve met with informally, deans, and the Career Development Center have all been incredibly helpful. Each of these groups were willing to meet with me and talk about where I saw myself going over the next few years, discuss why I was taking the classes I was taking, and help me with some internal struggles I dealt with at Brown. I think that students are largely seeking out mentors more than advisors and I’ve been able to find quite a few faculty members on campus who were willing to act in that role.
I hope that the Task Force recommendations for advising will begin to shift the culture of advising in the right direction. The Open Curriculum requires particular attention to advising. A smörgåsbord goes from an exciting experience to a very unpleasant one if a diner is not judicious and wise in their choices. The Open Curriculum can become overwhelming and uncomfortable in much the same way if a student is not prepared with the tools to make strong, informed choices. Advising at Brown is rarely a single relationship-- it’s a cohort between students, faculty, and staff. Effectively coordinating a huge number of sometimes seemingly disparate resources is critical to ensuring these cohorts are strong for all students. I think that the Task Force sought to create more points of contact between students and resources here on campus. The new Faculty Advising Fellows seek to place particularly strong advisors closer to students. Many students take part in our Faculty in Residence program already, so having an Advising Fellow on hand is a huge resource to students not comfortable with their assigned advisor or students seeking a different opinion. A Science Resource Center which can provide students with a single place to stop for basic advise on structural information at Brown will bridge a huge gap in institutional knowledge.
I think the difficult part of Brown is that there are so many opportunities and so many different paths to take that no one person can really be an expert on all things Brown. Students who think that any advisor can possibly have all of the answers are setting themselves up for failure. Luckily, our online resources have been greatly expanded and are rather comprehensive, but brining this information closer to the hands of students, easier, will lead to more widespread success navigating Brown. It’s difficult for me to assess advising, because my experience has been largely positive. I came to Brown to be independent and responsible and seek out what I wanted to take advantage of and I’ve always viewed my advising cohorts as a set of people whose opinion I respect and whose life experiences can inform my choices. In that role, advising at Brown I think is almost universally successful for all students by the time they graduate (though not always as early in the Brown experience as is ideal). However, we can do better communicating logistical information that’s powerful for navigating thousands of courses, study abroad experiences, research experiences, extracurricular activities, internships, career prospects, graduate school, etc.</p>