Two Years In: Thoughts about Brown, Taking Q's

Colleges and Universities A-Z Brown University
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<p>Hey all, I haven’t been on here in a while.</p>

<p>After a rough patch where I hadn’t found “my people” at the start of freshman year, I am actually now an ardent promoter of Brown and love explaining the strangenesses of Brown to all those interested, even in parent-friendly simplifying language.</p>

<p>I am going to be a junior now, I am studying Business Economics (part of the COE concentration), active on student council (aka UCS), a university part-time employee (at the university IT administration), a jaded finance summer intern in Hong Kong, and VERY talkative.</p>

<p>Having taken classes in lots of departments and with friends doing pretty much anything imaginable, from extra-curricular pole dancing to on-campus entrepreneurship, I can answer lots of questions.</p>

<p>Same great flavor, now with more experience!</p>

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<p>It’s great to see you back after your hiatus, hollyert!</p>

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<p>Could you talk about your “rough patch” and how you were able to eventually make friends.</p>

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<p>^ Yes, I’d be interested in hearing about that as well.</p>

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<p>Hey hollyert, glad to see you back! I know you in real life (lived with one of your friends last semester) :)</p>

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<p>Noway, thefunnything. I am kind of dense when it comes to remembering names and making 2+2 connections. PM me with your identity if you wish!</p>

<p>Ok well regarding the rough patch, you look into threads I have started you’ll see that I wrote one saying I had chosen the wrong school! Well I didn’t really choose Brown, I applied ED so that was that. But the point was that I thought I had trapped myself in a place where I couldn’t be happy. I wrote that post over Thanksgiving break my freshman year. A good bit of time has passed since.</p>

<p>Basically, I lived in rowdy hallway where most of the people living around me made good quick friends with each other. They are, and were, extremely friendly and nice people (who still live together now entering their junior year, which is pretty awesome for them). Problematically, they were also into partying, as are a lot of freshmen, while it made me feel alienated. Further, I was (and am!) dating someone who goes to another school, which made social situations at parties trickier. It was really overwhelming.</p>

<p>The way I got my way out of this situation: even though drinking made me uncomfortable, I decided to hang out with the kids on my hall whenever they got together. I didn’t drink but I did my best to join in whatever they were doing, having someone drink for me if they were playing a game, etc. Turns out that these kids really did not care one way or the other what I chose to ingest. While I had been reading their treatment of me as exclusionary, it turns out they just didn’t know me that well and weren’t sure if I wanted to be friends. Now, these folks did not become my BFFs, but they did introduce me to people that I am so grateful I know.</p>

<p>I think of myself as an extroverted person, and yet college made me feel shy and socially clumsy. If it can do it to me, it can do it to anyone. The solution was pushing myself out of my social comfort zone and reaching out to others to make friends. It doesn’t have to be an extracurricular activity. It can be sitting around in a hallmate’s room trying to participate in a discussion about sports.</p>

<p>Never eat alone was the second thing I learned. Always find a table with someone you sort of recognize, and ask to eat with them. You will find yourself sitting with the same group of people more and more frequently. Those people are your friends. It’s how I found my roommates, and it’s how I have a very tight group of young women I can trust completely and who are just the most entertaining people to be around.</p>

<p>Brown is a school of more than 6,000 people. It took me some time to sort through all of them! It took me more time than a lot of people, more than an entire semester. I don’t think transferring would have helped, mainly because I would have lost the few friends that I did have already and would have had to start all over with a new set of foreign bodies, and also because I wasn’t trying to escape Brown. I was trying to escape college in and of itself, and the values/cultural/comfort zone challenges it brings, which would have been waiting for me anywhere else I could have chosen to go, in one form or another.</p>

<p>God, am I glad I stayed. Because once I had developed my friends, I was able to focus on the reason Brown is a great school – the flexibility, the supportive professors and administration, the extreme niceness of the student body as a whole, the beauty of New England, the potential to do <em>anything</em>. Transferring away from that would have been insane.</p>

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<p>Wow, great post, hollyert! </p>

<p>Am I right in assuming that you should not go into college with the same assumptions as you would in most high schools? It seems like people aren’t as cliquey as you would assume at face value and others won’t pass judgement about you and deem themselves “too cool” to be friends. That’s great to know, and once again, thanks for the post.</p>

<p>Just out of curiosity, at what moment did you realize that Brown was the right school for you? I know it takes time to grow accustom to and appreciate things that you didn’t at first, but there are often instants in time (at least for me) when a realization smacks you in the face.</p>

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<p>Gratisfaction, I believe that cliquiness is just a defense mechanism, because in high school everyone is pretty insecure, or at the very least, unsure of themselves. Coming to college is liberating to most people, where they finally get to reestablish what their values and goals are and can quickly see that there are a lot of others who share those same values. Most people find that in college they’re no longer insecure–and thus don’t need the defense mechanisms found in high school, including bullying, cliques, judgmentalism and other -isms, and teacher’s-pet-ness.</p>

<p>Apparently I was quite slow in realizing that, and quite slow to feel that same type of liberation. But it turns out that the person I want to be is really quite acceptable at Brown, and all of my friends are improved versions of themselves since coming to Brown as well. This is probably true at most colleges where folks are open-minded.</p>

<p>As for when I realized that Brown was the right place for me, it was probably when I started being more active in Brown’s student government. When I started paying attention to what people were saying and trying to accomplish, I realized that there are so few schools that want students to conquer so much. The powers-that-be who run Brown are genuine people, and while they and students don’t necessarily agree all the time, the pan-campus consensus is that Brown students should be able to do anything they want to, intellectually and extracurricularly (not a word, I know). </p>

<p>There are other schools where you have to lobby, really lobby, to make your own class, to start a new student group, to get funding for a project, to design your own major, to write a thesis, to change student services. Most schools are run well, but not all of them are run with students’ goals in mind. And I feel like the entire school is supportive of students’ goals, from the tippy-top brass to bureaucrats in administrative roles to cafeteria workers to all your fellow Brunonians. People in Providence are also usually enthusiastic about student endeavors, since Providence is a beat up city and knows it needs an ally or two.</p>

<p>Being at Brown has made me feel like I can accomplish anything, because it lets me try to accomplish anything.</p>

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<p>Why was your internship jaded? Was there not a lot of hands-on work to be done? And was it one of the international COE internships? I’m just wondering because I have friends that are interested in working abroad.</p>

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<p>It is one of the COE internships. And it’s/I’m jaded because the work is in High Finance. Which is… not exactly saving kittens or going rock climbing. </p>

<p>My advice to your friends, Lapras, is only work abroad someplace where they will know people. I’m currently in a city of 8 million people of whom I know about 6. Because I am living alone in an apartment, feeding myself, and touring the city, I am getting a great lesson in independence, not just in living abroad, which I feel is the most valuable thing I’ll get out of this summer. And that could be achieved by living quite a bit closer to home and friends.</p>

<p>Of course, if they know people in Paris/Tokyo/Nairobi and that’s where they get an internship, that seems like a no-brainer. Otherwise they’ll be emotionally “roughing it” when they come to an utterly foreign place and have very few people to spend time with. </p>

<p>I also highly recommend the COE international internship program (to those on the fence between COE and some other similar concentration). They really hook you up. They do an excellent job finding good (relatively, for finance) places to work and the stipend offered makes the program as affordable as an unpaid or barely-paid internship in your hometown.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the advice Hollyert :slight_smile: I have one more question: is there something special about the COE department that swayed you to concentrate in that vs. Econ/Double major econ/APMA-Econ or something? I’ve been trying to figure out what path I want to take, but talking to advisors has been quite…disheartening since I’ve only taken the main core for Econ so far and don’t really know which way I want to go, and my advisor’s kind of following the “just choose what’s best for you” approach. I also don’t know many students in the COE department but know a few in Econ (who have been helpful but I want more opinions). Thank you again!</p>

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<p>Ok, so I was in a very, very similar situation. Here were my options and why I ruled them out:</p>

<ol>
<li>Straight-up Econ: A really huge major that’s extremely segmented by advisor. So say you want to have one of the Math-Econ advisors advise you: too bad, if you’re not doing the joint concentration. I thought it was impersonal. In terms of requirements, it’s probably one of the easiest and most flexible at Brown, which is why so many students double-concentrate in Econ and something else.</li>
<li>Econ-CS: I dropped CS 17 two months in to the class because, while I love computers and web development, late night in the Sun Lab were not for me. Ergo no Econ-CS.</li>
<li>Econ-APMA: Turns out I don’t really like math, and after completing multivariable calculus (Math 20) I really had no interest in taking higher levels of calculus. That said, most of us econ-types will end up learning a little more (including some matrix algebra stuff) just by nature of what we are learning, but it’s taken in context and not isolated.</li>
<li>Econ & something else: I was considering Econ with Science&Society, but that was a lot of required classes and I wasn’t sure I wanted to sacrifice the flexibility to do other things. I feel like overall, the courses I take will come very close to fulfilling these two concentrations without my having declared them.</li>
<li>Independent concentration: It was going to be a smush of Econ, Engineering (business- and tech-focused classes), and Science & Society. It was also going to be a hell of a lot of work to put together.</li>
<li>COE Business Economics: To be honest, the reason I chose COE was because I love the advisor, Maria Carkovic. She is so, so nice. She is the kind of person I want to give me advice and to write me recommendations. Because COE is far more structured than Econ, for example, it has some major positives – like breadth of learning, exposure to other areas of social sciences, writing and teamwork skill development – and some negatives – at least one of the required classes won’t appeal to you at all.</li>
</ol>

<p>COE has a further advantage over Econ in that you have access to all of Econ’s resources but they don’t have access to all of yours: for example, I could be doing a UROP in the Econ department, but an Econ major couldn’t be doing my COE internship. I only had to compete with other COE majors for this position, which was great for me.</p>

<p>I don’t know how COE got a reputation as a “jock major” – the Business Economics track, at the very least, requires some seriously challenging classes and has 5 more required classes than plain-vanilla Econ. </p>

<p>Econ and econ-related classes I’ve taken, for context. An * represents it was required by my concentration:</p>

<p>Principles of Econ, Microecon<em>, Macroecon</em>, APMA1650 (taken in place of Intro Econometrics 1620 <em>), Econ1630 (Econometrics I - taken as an elective), Econ1760 (Financial Institutions - taken as an elective), Investments I</em>, Soc1090*</p>

<p>Some of these classes are harder than the required classes. It’s possible to make COE quite challenging.</p>

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<p>Would you say that most students at Brown are drinking or smoking pot? Did you find a group of friends that does not?</p>

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<p>Smoking weed is much more rare than drinking is, despite Brown’s reputation. I think drinking is very common, but not necessarily balls-out partying binge drinking. A good number of Brown students drink like the rest of the adult population drinks – in moderation. There are a good number of students who don’t drink, but don’t expect there to be alcohol-free parties. </p>

<p>While a lot of socializing involves drinking, none of it revolves solely around alcohol. If you don’t want to be drinking you don’t have to – though you might find that “ragers” (really big sweaty frat parties) a lot less stimulating than your more inebriated friends.</p>

<p>EDIT: In regards to the comment about finding friends who don’t drink: Yes, I have friends who don’t drink, or who drink very rarely. But our circle of friends isn’t based around this, and it’s not why we’re friends. I think choice of beverage matters much less than choice of conversation and socializing venues. I’d rather spend all night with a friend who drinks wine while talking about politics or girly things than spend time with a sober friend who wants to chase boys at a party.</p>

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<p>Not sure if Hollyert (glad you’re posting again!) wanted to keep this thread to herself in terms of responding to questions – if so, let me know – but I thought I’d chime in about the alcohol issue, since it’s a pet issue of mine. I agree with everything that Hollyert said, I just have one point to add.</p>

<p>I lived in Europe for high school, so I came to college with an understanding of what moderate drinking is. My group of friends in high school was both (a) academically talented, and (b) full of moderate drinkers. Many students coming from high schools in the US didn’t seem to have this perspective. Many of them came to college with a strong mental association between drinking and the worst people from their high school – and that’s a perfectly understandable association, given the situation in a lot of high schools. It just doesn’t reflect the reality of the outside world – something most people come to realize eventually, regardless of their preconceptions.</p>

<p>So I say this to incoming college students: Whether or not drinking is in your own future, it’s important to recognize as early as possible that in the real world, drinking is something done by most people – even people as smart and mild-mannered as you are. Think about that before you write off people who you might be friendly with because they drink, or make the choice to go to sub-free housing, or alienate others with self-righteous rants.</p>

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<p>Agreed with mgsinc. I had some preconceived notions about alcohol before coming to Brown. I didn’t drink in high school, and while I still don’t, I’ve become a lot more accepting of it as social behavior. There is a difference between sharing a bottle of wine over dinner and downing three Four Lokos at a party. That being said, please be careful, whether you choose to drink (or smoke) or not. EMS is there for a reason, but you shouldn’t be a regular patron.</p>

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<p>You two are totally right, and thanks for jumping in and validating my ramblings!</p>

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<p>Does brown send many people to investment banking?</p>

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<p>Yes! Indeed. I-banks recruit here quite heavily. To work in I-banking you will need to have a fairly quantitative mindset, with courses that demonstrate how good you are at business math. Thus many I-bankers-to-be are APMA-Econ or Math-Econ concentrators. However it’s possible to take enough math outside of these programs to satisfy recruiters.</p>

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<p>It’s probably the case anywhere, but there are a number of students who are really opposed to those going into investment banking, here. From what I’ve seen, it seems to be strongest among the APMA-Econ concentrators who want nothing to do with I-banking, though I haven’t been able to figure out why.</p>