<p>Brown sounds like the perfect college thus far. But are there any downers?</p>
<p>For a start, Brown is definitely not the place for everyone. I had a couple of friends leave after one semester, and I know of at least seven others who did as well. Some of them are taking time off, either because they didn’t think they were ready for college or because of certain circumstances, but a number of other people just didn’t like Brown. While there is advising, the Open Curriculum can be overwhelming. You’re handed a course catalog with hundreds of courses and told to pick four. If you’re not ready for the lack of structure, then you may run into some trouble. Moreover, some advisors are very good, and some are very bad. There are deans to help confused students, but some people may be too intimidated or find the administration difficult to navigate.</p>
<p>As with any school, the social atmosphere may shape your experience. While Brown is not the quintessential party school, it’s certainly more crazier than some of its peers. Depending on where you live and the friends you make, you might get sucked into a scene that doesn’t fit your interests. I know one girl who lived in Keeney and despised her first semester, largely because she couldn’t find anyone to hang out with on weekends who didn’t share her sub-free life style.</p>
<p>(That being said, not everyone parties hard… or at least, not all parties are washed with alcohol. And if partying isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other ways to spend your free time. There is always something going on, and lots of people hang out together on weekend nights talking, listening to music, watching movies, etc.)</p>
<p>Our housing system is terrible (yes, you can get a single sophomore yearor as a freshman if you’re very luckybut look at the lottery this year). Most people are left in the dark, especially once they go on summer assignment. Our food is decent, but not fantastic. Then again, I wouldn’t suggest choosing a college based on housing and dining reputations.</p>
<p>^Our housing system is the best for the number/type of dorm rooms we have. It ensures that you get maximum control of where you choose to live, because you have the pick of EVERY room that’s still available. That being said, we don’t have enough great rooms, as evidenced by the number of people on summer assignment and sophomores choosing triples in the lottery. Brown guarantees everyone housing, but if everyone actually entered the lottery, we’d be short about 1500ish beds (I believe ~20% of the Junior class typically lives off campus, and ~80% of the senior class does). Furthermore, you’re never forced to CHOOSE a triple (you can enter at the top of summer assignment if you are unable to choose a double or single), but summer assignment can still assign you one if no doubles/singles are available.</p>
<p>Also, being on the hill means that, without a car, it’s kind of difficult to get to box-stores, so getting cheap school/dorm supplies typically involves buying online or having a parent drive to get stuff. And there’s no real close Chipotle, so it makes dressing as a burrito to get a free one on Halloween difficult.</p>
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<p>On the contrary-- [Chipotle:</a> welcome to our humble home — Blog Daily Herald](<a href=“http://blogdailyherald.com/2010/07/10/chipotle-welcome-to-our-humble-home/]Chipotle:”>http://blogdailyherald.com/2010/07/10/chipotle-welcome-to-our-humble-home/)</p>
<p>We average about 10 kids transferring out each year. Thefunnything has an unusual sample of folks.</p>
<p>I heard the food is not very good.</p>
<p>The food is decent. It’s better at the VW than at the Ratty. It’s seldom amazing (actually, come to think of it, it’s worse than what they served at my high school), but I wouldn’t call the food a negative.</p>
<p>I’ve had some bad experiences with the administration and professors not answering e-mails, and I haven’t had the best of luck with the students around me in the dorm accepting my political ambivalence, but at least some of that is my fault for not being more active in seeking out like-minded and more tolerating students. I’ve had several professors who really couldn’t teach to save their lives (you’ll find this at most similar schools, though). I’m not overly fond of Providence, though I’ve come to accept it, at least. I suppose my biggest complaint is the coursework. I’ve found it to be time consuming but not overly challenging; rather than a “do what it takes to learn this material” approach, which I prefer, I’ve had “do this project/problem set/translation, regardless of whether it’s what you need to learn the material or not.” It may just be my fields - classics is not incredibly conductive to assignments other than “translate x lines,” intro language classes are easy but require much repetition by nature, math gives tedious problem sets by necessity, and most computer science projects I’ve run into have been large in scope rather than thought-inducing. I feel that I could get more out of the material working on my own, but the required work for the courses take up enough time that I seldom read on my own anymore. I don’t know how different this is at other schools, though - many of my friends from high school have complained about similar problems at a wide range of colleges; it may just be that this is how college is run.</p>
<p>^Admittedly, though, from what I know of your background, Uroogla, you were a lot more prepared for the college experience than most of us. My butt was kicked last year, and I had to figure stuff out on my own in order to understand material. But, that’s how I had to go through my high school if I wanted to really understand most of my classes (rather than regurgitate information), because HS was 90% busywork for me, whereas here I feel I might get 5-10% busywork, if the class isn’t very good, and 1-2% if it is good. But I’m coming from a background where nearly all the material I’m learning now is new.</p>
<p>I’ve read a lot of your posts, Uroogla, and can definitely see the reasons behind this one since you came from Phillips Andover, one of the best schools in the nation. All that harkness and thinking skills must’ve been the greatest preparation.</p>
<p>I suppose a lot of what I dislike has less to do with my being bored (I’m not; Brown is not an institute for slackers, nor are many of its courses easy) than with a disagreement in how many of the classes are conducted. I completely understand having discussion classes where homework + participation total a large percentage of the grade. What bothers me is having classes where the sum of one’s homework grade is 10% of one’s final grade. To me, that’s akin to saying “these don’t really matter but you have to do them anyway.” I feel that it’s assignments like that that have shaped my view of Brown’s classes. Brown just has a very different atmosphere than my high school, and I still haven’t adjusted. Many of my peers have had trouble adjusting, too, as the teaching and expected learning style is so different. I really doubt, though, that this is specific to Brown, and I’m speaking as an idealist rather than a pragmatist - it’s something to consider if it’s not what you’re used to, but it should be taken in the context of my specific background, with a grain of salt.</p>
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<p>I have to agree, Uroogla. It’s similarly annoying when labs for science classes count for a relatively small part of your total grade, considering the amount of time put into the lab itself, the lab report, etc. But like you said, I’d guess that most college have similar policies.</p>
<p>I mean I sort of agree with the lab thing, for chem330 labs were 20% and it probably took 40-50% of the time between preparing, doing and writing up labs. But then again, the point is do you know the material or not…so I can see the teacher’s approach.</p>
<p>Good:
there are basically no rules at Brown, and 99 times out of 100, it rocks.</p>
<p>Bad:
The math department teachers for the most part, especially of the 0xxx classes, are average at best. This applies to most of the applied math department too. If you’re stuck in an intro math/science class, you’re rolling the dice and might get a terrible teacher. Moreover, it might be a prereq that you’re just not going to squeeze around. I was expecting the best of the best coming to Brown, but I realized that most of these teachers are teaching the upper levels classes that are for upperclassmen. Of course, there are many exceptions. You’re going to have to hunt around to get a good education…but then again that’s part of getting your education :)</p>
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<p>This is definitely going to depend on the department. For instance, the beloved Ken Miller teaches bio 200.</p>
<p>There are a few downers to Brown, but most of them are pretty subtle. Let me explain.</p>
<p>I’m an 09 grad, currently in a top 5 medical school’s MD-PhD program. I was a biochemistry/math double major while at Brown, and in both departments had many excellent teachers and not-so-good teachers - I credit a lot of the reasons why I’m here to my biochem profs who really knew how to grind difficult knowledge into your head (Art Salomon, Mark Johnson, David Cane, etc, all excellent profs). The main reasons I applied ED to Brown were the open curriculum (valid) and the PLME program (not as valid), and I filled out my application in a way that if I got rejected PLME I was still locked into going to the school. (to give you some bearings, I think my high school stats are on here somewhere, but the highlights include qualification for the USAMO and USABO)</p>
<p>For most people, the open curriculum is really great. And it was for me too - it was very convenient to not have to deal with core requirements while picking classes. Unfortunately, if you’re pre-med or pre-professional, those requirements take up so much of your time ANYWAY that you may as well have a core to deal with. So that advantage was nullified. I’m not saying its as bad as Columbia, where I’m told the core will eat your soul, but its just as bad as a place like Yale, Penn, or Harvard, which has a manageable but sizable set of requirements. Same issue with the pass/fail system; I took very few (I think none, actually) courses pass-fail because I knew how bad that would look. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but if you’re considering a pre-professional track you should keep that in mind.</p>
<p>The other big problem with Brown has everything to do with ranking and name recognition. I don’t want to launch into a huge debate about why Brown is ranked so low in the USNWR (worse than Northwestern? ***?), but I think everyone can agree that its ranked lower than HYPS (its still a top 10 school in my eyes, and one that you have to work hard to go to. You’ll never hear me say that Brown is a 2nd-tier institution, just a 1.5-tier one). And there’s a reason for that. Brown’s undergraduate has an incredible marketing campaign going, saying that they’re completely focused on undergrads as an institution. While this may look really good on paper, essentially all this means is that all of Brown’s graduate programs are pretty bad - and the literature bears this out. In terms of HHMI scholars, NIH grants, NSF funding, etc, Brown almost UNIVERSALLY comes up short. What does that mean for you as an undergraduate? Well, if you’re going to go to grad or med school, you’ll necessarily be doing a little research, of course. But you’re not going to be doing research with a leader in your field. In fact, you’ll probably be doing research with, at best, a lieutenant in your field. Furthermore, the research facilities available to you are simply not up to par. For example, for a series of experiments I was participating in as an undergrad, we were severely hampered by not having a next-generation DNA sequencer, which is something that many other biology departments have fairly easy access to. Not only did this compromise our publishing timetable, it meant our results weren’t nearly as robust as we would have liked. So if you want to see what high-powered, ground-breaking research is like (and even participate in said research), Brown is probably not the place you want to go, in ANY field.</p>
<p>Another sort of myth that gets promulgated about Brown is that its the most laid-back, liberal, easygoing ivy. Let me make two points clear. First, no matter where you go, if you want to be laid back, you can be laid back (except MIT). Note I said be “laid back”, not “slack off” (although you can do that too). Just stay on top of your work and don’t kill yourself with many hard classes. My friends at HYPS were just as laid back as I was, sometimes even more - this is not unique to Brown. Secondly, you’re going to find liberals and conservatives wherever you go - maybe the ratio will be a little skewed at Brown, but so what? You can elect not to hang out with Evangelical creationists at Yale just as easily as not hanging out with them at Brown. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Brown also portrays itself as the pot-smoking, sexually-liberated Ivy. Guess what people? You can get marijuana and casual sex no matter which college you go to (sometimes at the same time), including much better colleges! So don’t feel like you have to go to Brown in order to have some fun (and my fun I don’t mean your parents brand of fun, with the playing of the monopoly and whatnot) - you can have that anywhere! Brown loves to play up SexPowerGod, for example, as the bacchanalia of elite higher-education, but those sorts of parties exist wherever you go. </p>
<p>Essentially, whatever academic field Brown does, there are at least 5 colleges that do it better, with more money, and with just as much undergraduate participation. And whatever perceived unique student-life characteristic that Brown has, they simply advertise it more than other schools who don’t need to. The idea that Brown has created a uniquely liberal and open academic society is patently untrue - my friends at other, more highly-regarded institutions have had just as much success approaching professors for summer research jobs and extracurriculars. The extracurricular opportunities offered to you at Brown are good, but the opportunities at HYPSMCaltechPennColumbia are even better, no matter what area of study you go into. </p>
<p>PS. For you premeds out there, whatever you do, don’t apply PLME. Its Brown’s way of subtly locking very good students into going to the 30th ranked med school in the country.</p>
<p>This thread is depressing the hell out of me.</p>
<p>Geoforce221…what is the gist of your post? I know this is an insult Brown thread, but that was pretty strong-winded.</p>
<p>"Geoforce221…what is the gist of your post? I know this is an insult Brown thread, but that was pretty strong-winded. "</p>
<p>[Sorry, I haven’t figured out the quote thing yet!]</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Brown’s laid-back image makes it seem infinitely more chill, liberal, cool, etc, than other places, but its not. You can be chill wherever you go, there’s sex and drugs wherever you go, there’s excellent undergrad focus wherever you go, etc. Don’t get caught up in the mystique of Brown as the awesome-laid-back Ivy, because its overblown, esp if you care about going to a professional school.</p></li>
<li><p>Brown’s so-called “undergrad focus” hides the fact that it has relatively weak grad programs and somewhat weak academics overall (by weak I mean bottom of first-tier area. We’re speaking in very precise terms here). You’ll get attention no matter where you go, and you’ll have the opportunity to participate in much more ground-breaking, high-powered academic enterprises at better-ranked schools.</p></li>
<li><p>The open curriculum is great, but if you’re pre-professional keep in mind that many of its effects are nullified.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>It seems like Brown would be a good school for pre-professional (non research) people. Wouldn’t the generally high GPA’s allow easier admission to MBA and JD schools?</p>
<p>Engineerjw brings up a great point, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold that much water. The pre-med, pre-law, and pre-business programs at HYP universally have better placement into better professional schools than Brown does, in terms of raw numbers. A few points:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I don’t want to make it seem like the Brown name is some kind of pot-stained black mark that will automatically lock the door to Harvard Business School. People do, with regularity from Brown, gain admission to the top grad/med/law/business programs (and this includes Harvard Med, Yale Law, Stanford Business, etc. Many students at Brown aren’t kidding around). But Brown in general is not the greatest feeder school for these places. Can you get into Harvard Law from Brown? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But you won’t be in abundant company, most of the time.</p></li>
<li><p>The idea that its easier to get a high GPA at Brown may hold some merit. Emphasis on MAY. One thing that’s not often emphasized about Brown is the lack of plus/minus grading (No A- or B+) which certainly does take the edge off. But overall people with similar capabilities at Brown and other places without grade deflation (MIT and Princeton are exceptions, see) get similar GPAs. And a few points here and there isn’t going to make or break you anyway; its just as likely that someone will know about Brown’s lax grading policies and knock a few points off (I know that law schools will adjust GPA at least partly based on major and undergraduate school of origin).</p></li>
<li><p>There’s a reason that many professional schools take so many people from their own undergraduate institution - those applicants are working for, interacting with, and getting recommendations from the same people that run the admissions show! That’s not to say that if you go to MIT you have an automatic in at Sloan, but it does make you think.</p></li>
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<p>As a parting shot, I leave you with this. A really good friend (incidentally, at Harvard) told me something interesting after I was rejected from my first choice medical school: “The best tend to percolate to the top with time”. This is also true of admissions. There’s a reason that Harvard Med isn’t made up of 100% HYPS kids - its because there’s talent everywhere, and the college admissions process is far from a rigorous screen of capability. Consider it this way - each admissions process is an iterative sampling of the raw talent of a population. If you’re talented, you might hit some bad breaks and end up at a state school, but you can flourish during the next round, destroy the LSAT, and end up at Harvard Law (and these things happen). But if you’ve already been pre-selected during the first round (by going to a good school), then the posterior probability of you having a high degree of talent is much higher in the eyes of an admissions committee, especially if you have the application to back it up.</p>
<p>I almost want to come out of retirement to refute some of the above (especially the notion that you won’t be in abundant company at Harvard Law, which btw, is the law school with the most Brown students in any given year). Suffice to say that as a graduate in 09 (and AM 10) who worked in the Chem department, I disagree with 95% of what geoforce has to say about the teaching quality at Brown and research experience (based on my experiences and the experiences of friends).</p>
<p>If the argument is that Brown is not as good, overall, as HYP from a purely academic standpoint then the answer anyone would give is “Duh.” It’s not that we cannot compete, it’s just that we can only claim to be better for specific people in specific situations. Whether or not the difference has practical meaning is another story-- I, and many others would argue that what differences do exist, though being largely in HYP’s favor, are real, but negligible.</p>
<p>For those who are more statistically inclined, we’d say that while the results are statistically significant, they are not practically significant-- i.e. they don’t represent a substantive quantitative or qualitative difference.</p>
<p>I had friends in my graduate school program who suggest they wouldn’t have gone to places like (and including) Harvard had they been more informed during their application process and knew more about Brown. This is more common in my experience than finding a Brown student who wishes they went elsewhere.</p>
<p>Finally, I would say that the experience of someone who is extremely pre-professionally driven is going to be drastically different at Brown than someone who isn’t. In general, while MANY go on the pre-professional fields, MOST at Brown don’t have the same attitude as the general pre-professional population in my experience. It depends on your orientation.</p>