<p>So why did you apply to brown? I mean a lot of people say the open curriculum is their main reason for choosing Brown over other schools but there has to be something else?</p>
<p>What I could do with the Open Curriculum was biggest, but given that I also considered Grinnell, that wasn’t the only factor. My reasons were primarily academic; I could take Computational Linguistics here and not at many other schools, I could potentially take graduate level classics courses and thus not be bounded by the undergraduate offerings of the smaller LACs, but I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the size of the student body or be ignored in the place of the grad students. Providence isn’t my idea of the greatest place to be (I’m more a fan of a campus like Middlebury’s, isolated as it may be), but it’s a place I’m fine with living for some of my life. I’m not liberal, but I haven’t had much trouble finding friends who aren’t going to try to shove their views at me. I believe the final thing that made me decide on Brown was how the grading system lets me focus more on the classes and less on freaking out about the difference between a 92.9 and a 93.1 percent (which at my high school was a huge GPA difference but at Brown are both As). It’s not perfect for me, but it has many qualities that were great for me, and the few things I wasn’t crazy about are relatively minor.</p>
<p>Originally? It was one of the schools that had both IR and Engineering (neither of which I’m actually studying), that sounded somewhat interesting, and was far away from home. But once I started studying, and had to narrow my college list? Open curriculum, a friend’s recommendation, and because it sounded interesting.</p>