<p>Pton definetely has accessible professors. Every professor/faculty member at Pton has required office hours where any student can come and consult them. Whether just for the simple pleasure of talking to a Nobel Prize winner or just anything.</p>
<p>Profs at all universities have office hours. The question is not whether they actually have office hours, but whether they make students feel comfortable going to office hours, what kind of relationships they have with their students, whether they are interested in the studentsâ work, whether they have students involved in their research, etc. Iâm not saying Princetonâs profs arenât accessible â I donât have any experience with Princeton profs â Iâm just saying that office hours are a necessary but insufficient condition. :)</p>
<p>I know PLME is a direct med program, are there any others?</p>
<p>I am a big booster of Brown, but Iâll be the first to tell you that its math department is not one of its strong suits. Applied math is very strong. Economics is strong. But math â not so much. And I partly know that from several people, past and present, who went to Brown planning on concentrating on math and changed their minds once they got there.</p>
<p>How is Brown different from the other Ivies? Itâs in Rhode Island, and none of the other Ivies are there.</p>
<p>I found Brownâs Applied Math department to be comically bad, but thatâs based only on 2 (admittedly upper level) courses with different professors. Iâm concentrating in math in spite of the weakness of the department (though I gather a few professors are quite good). Part of the weakness of the low level math courses are because theyâre primarily the first teaching experience for graduate students. As a result, students arenât as well prepared for the upper level courses and struggle more or stop concentrating in the field. Would I come to Brown for math alone? No. There are better options.</p>
<p>Iâm surprised you found that uroogla-- at least in terms of research clout/grad school, the Applied Math department at Brown is considered one of the best in the country.</p>
<p>Also, Iâve known a few top students who came here for math and applied math because of the flexibility provided to them when it came to being able to register right away for many upper level courses and access graduate level work easily. The three guys Iâm thinking of all felt the math departments here were plenty strong for someone who was very serious about math as an undergrad, but felt that theyâd run out of things to do if they were coming here for grad school. Two of those three guys are now getting Econ PhDs at UChicago, I forget what the third guy I doing.</p>
<p>Iâve definitely heard that the graduate program is quite strong; itâs certainly possible that I just got 2 bad professors in courses I found much easier than my peers (APMA1650 and APMA1660); but those were 2 of the 3 courses Iâve taken at Brown where I came to the conclusion that Iâd learn better by not going to class and just reading the textbook. I donât know anyone else whoâs taken advanced courses in the department, so I may just have a small sample size, but I was far from impressed.</p>
<p>I know several undergraduate math majors who are currently taking primarily graduate level courses, and they seem pretty happy with those, so that seems to match what youâve viewed. When I hear about the math department, itâs normally complaints about MATH0090, MATH0100, MATH0170, and MATH0180, not the upper level classes (I had an alright experience in the differential equations course I took, but the irregularity of grading - 5 problem sets, no exams, and we were told we werenât expected to do well on the problem sets - made it somewhat stressful and confusing). I feel that youâre better off choosing Brown for the ability to do math while being able to explore other fields, rather than just for math (those students I mentioned are all either computer scientists as well or very active in language courses).</p>
<p>I generally agree that Brown is an ideal place to be very strong at math and bring it other places.</p>
<p>Iâll never understand why people find stats to be very challenging-- itâs assumptions are very simple and sorta natural, the whole thing passes the âgrandma testâ. I think your issues are somewhat the nature of any stats course. I almost took 165 and 166 because the stats in my graduate program have been far too easy for me but I was basically told not to bother because I wouldnât get much additional actionable knowledge for what I want to do and less/no experience with computational software that Iâll be using. The other thing is that 165 and 166 attracts a lot of people who are not as into math as youâd think an upper level AM course would suggest.</p>
<p>The other thing Iâll say is that math as a field is one where many students will always find it easier to learn out of the book, regardless of the talent of your instructor. I think itâs just the nature of the work-- sometimes you just need to bust through it a few different ways yourself and let it sink it to really understand it. Thatâs been my experience.</p>
<p>That being said, my MA17 class was great, MA18 was terrible, MA52 was great again-- you really just have to shop those lower level courses to find the right section.</p>
<p>Brownâs financial aid to middle class families is not as generous as Yale, Princeton, or Harvard, where, in general, tuition is assessed at 10% of AGI less than 180K. Brown just doesnât have the financial resources to match HYP.</p>
<p>Princeton definitely has issues, but accessibility of professors is not one of them. My brother (senior undergrad) has had a terrific experience, and has fantastic relationships with many of his professors. With such a small graduate program, professors are always willing to spend time with the undergrads.</p>
<p>I flew into providence from the west coast a few days ago to visit brown and happened to be sitting next to a brown neuro professor (seriously, what are the chances of that?!) anyway, she gave me all her contact info and told me to drop by her lab if I wanted to. So yesterday I walked into her office unnanounced with my parents and she actually kicked a grad student out to talk to us and give me advice. Idk if this would be what another ivy league professor (or any prof at all) would do, but it definitely makes brown stick out in my mind.</p>
<p>so what are brownâs really strong depts?</p>