Wesleyan vs. Brown as a transfer student

johnwesley
Mon, 14 May 2012 03:40:24 +0000

^^I would put it slightly differently; I would ask myself whether going to Brown is worth giving up Wesleyan’s intimacy and coherency. Transfer students at Wesleyan are typically given what are, IMO, the best dorm selections for sophomores - Nicholson and Hewitt dorms; they are almost immediately integrated into the social fabric of the campus. Brown at its best is a larger version of Wesleyan which has its drawbacks; each is diverse, each is the least pre-professioal member of their “league”. Both boast a great deal of freedom (you may already have fulfilled Wesleyan’s distribution "“expectations” while at Cornell, for instance), but, Brown is known to be rather cliquey and you are never going to know more than a small sliver of the members of your class.

Beyond that, I would say, there is far less departmentalization at Wesleyan, meaning, it’s easier to find courses that relate to your interests even though they may fall outside your major (Film is a big example of this - almost every language taught at Wesleyan offers a film course). Wesmaps, the online course catalogue, will help you find those connections and to be perfectly frank, the connections are a function of Wesleyan’s small size. The Brown graduates I’ve met have complained that it is much easier to graduate with just a collection of courses that have no relationship to each other.