<p>I attended Summer@Brown this past summer (2013) and I loved it. As far as your questions go:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>From what I hear, it’s not really that difficult to get in. If you can afford it and if your grades are somewhat decent, you’ll be fine. My unweighted GPA was a 4.0 when I applied, but the essays I wrote weren’t very original or inspired and I did them pretty quickly.</p></li>
<li><p>The class I took was Techniques in DNA-Based Biotechnology. There were two different classes for my course because each one capped at 20 people. I can’t really speak too much for average class size because mine was capped, but I think they usually tend to range from 20-30 people, perhaps more for the super popular courses (like So You Think You Want to Be a Doctor). I actually ended up being somewhat ambivalent about the course – it was rather interesting, but parts of it went over my head because I hadn’t taken a bio course since freshman year (currently a HS senior).</p></li>
<li><p>I loved my instructors. One was part of the Brown faculty and another was a lab assistant, I believe? They were both very accessible and even had two days during the three weeks where they went to the SciLi and helped people with questions/their end-of-course presentations.</p></li>
<li><p>Workload/homework varied by day. Pretty much everything I did was labwork so homework was prereading labs, reading textbook stuff, finishing up lab questions, etc. I’d say I spent ~2 hours on homework a day, although one of the girls on my floor was in a philosophy course and had a bunch of reading to do every night (whether or not she did it is an entirely different matter, however).</p></li>
<li><p>I attempted to not drown in my sweat during my free time. sux2suck. K but actually, I hung out with people and it was honestly the best part of my Summer@Brown experience. Thayer Street is obviously right there and it has a bunch of quaint little stores and restaurants to poke your head into. The mall isn’t too far away, either. There’s a decent chance there’ll be good artists on tour in Providence while you’re there (two of my floormates went to a Mac Miller concert and met him). RISD is super close, so you should probably take a look at the RISD museum sometime if you’re at all interested in art; it’s definitely something I wish I would have done while I was there. There are designated nights where Providence hosts WaterFire, something else I wish I would have been able to witness, although I’ve also heard it’s overrated (?). Your Brown ID gets you free access to public buses, which I believe can take you anywhere around RI for free. With that being said, think about whether or not you should be a lazy bum because one time, a friend and I literally wasted more time waiting for the bus than it would have taken us to walk all the way down to the mall (which is where we were going). Boston and NYC (to a degree) are also pretty accessible if you’re feeling in the mood to explore the northeast.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>As far as like, actual legit Summer@Brown activities, the Summer@Brown people arrange trips every weekend on both Saturday and Sunday (for example, a trip could be to Newport, the Black Ships Festival, Wrentham shopping outlets, maybe Boston? I don’t remember anymore; I think there was one but I’m pretty sure it ended up getting canceled. Anyway, stuff like that) that you have to sign up for. Each trip is from like 9 am-3 pm or around that general timeframe. You take buses to wherever it is and it’s generally pretty fun if you’re going with some friends. There are obviously chaperones on the buses but once you arrive at the destination, you’re on your own until whatever designated time you’re supposed to be back on the bus. There are also some pretty cool activities that go on during weekdays – movie nights, human mario kart, faculty lunches, lectures/presentations (there’s a sex one that everybody goes to), talent shows, ghost in the graveyard, tie dye, friendship bracelet making, etc. If you’re really interested, there’s a Guidebook app for iPhones/maybe Androids that you can download the Summer@Brown schedule from last year onto to see exactly what went on!</p>
<ol>
<li>I’ve never actually attended any other summer programs, so I guess I can’t offer any comparative empirical evidence. With that being said, it wasn’t as though Brown was the only summer program I was considering, but it rose to the top of my list for a few reasons. For one, a lot of the Brown programs aren’t the 7-week ones you can take for college credit. Obviously, if you’re only interested in college credit, that’s not really an influential point, but I was more interested in the experience, and a lot of summer programs (like Harvard, I believe) only offer incredibly long and intensive ~2 month summer programs. Brown offers a bunch of 1 week, 2 week, 3 week, etc. courses that you can mix and match to suit your interests and to suit the amount of time you want to spend on a precollege program. Second, Brown is somewhat less costly than Harvard/Yale/what have you, especially if you’re taking a shorter course because price is correlated with course length and again, see point one. Finally, I guess it comes down to what exactly you want from a precollege experience and where you want to go to college. I picked Brown because I thought the city of Providence looked beautiful, I’m very interested in art so the proximity to RISD was a huge plus, and since I live in the midwest and have visited the northeast very infrequently (read: like…three times in my life), I thought it’d be a good chance to visit one of the colleges that I really want to go to.</li>
</ol>
<p>Essentially, any summer program at a prestigious university is likely to be a great experience because it’s not so much the college as it is what you make of it (incredibly cliche, maybe, but true). In my opinion, you should pick a college that you think you could see yourself at in the future because these summer programs are really good for getting a feel for the college campus itself. Not so much the people that you might run into if you end up at x college, since your program will probably just be comprised of a lot of rich, entitled kids; with that being said, the RAs present combined with simply being there on campus should at least give you a somewhat good idea of what it would be like to be a student there!</p>
<p>Sorry for rambling and for the super long wall of text but dang I loved Summer@Brown a lot. Fingers crossed for my March 27 admissions decision haaaaa. Anyway, feel free to PM me with any additional questions/clarification or whatever (or post them here; I’ll do my best to reply).</p>