<p>Oh don’t get me wrong, Brown’s a great school and I have several friends there. It would have been my next choice after UChicago. It’s just that I believe a dog with the intellectual capacity to attend a university would choose the liberal, loosely-structured Brown education over the rigors of Uchicago. Then it could just sit around and smoke weed and play Super Mario all day instead of slogging through Marx or Ovid. Anybody who owns a dog knows that’s exactly what they would do if they went to college.</p>
<p>is this meant to reference Family Guy?</p>
<p>Personally I would love to have Brian as a peer. </p>
<p>I think that Brown trusts its students to be responsible enough to make use of their educational opportunities.</p>
<p>Do you think they admit many people who would do nothing but play super mario?</p>
<p>“Do you think they admit many people who would do nothing but play super mario?”</p>
<p>They admitted my friend! </p>
<p>(Ok, if you still haven’t caught on, I have been incorporating a little “humor” into my posts. Nobody is really going to last for more than a month at most schools if all they do is smoke weed and play Super Mario. It was a joke.)</p>
<p><em>sigh</em> this reminds me of the “we are uncommon” protest, the argument included something about “if you don’t want to work hard, go to Harvard…or better yet Brown.” I know you can get an incredible education at Chicago, I just don’t think that means you can’t at a school like Brown.</p>
<p>besides, sometimes even very bright dogs can’t make it at Brown:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEdaqPCS7rY[/url]”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEdaqPCS7rY</a></p>
<p>sorry, wrong one. i meant this one:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Q244CIVfA&mode=related&search=[/url]”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Q244CIVfA&mode=related&search=</a></p>
<p>"Of the boards that I am familiar with, Harvard and MIT also seem to get a lot of nasty posts. </p>
<p>pebbles: hear hear from the MIT board."</p>
<p>The MIT blogs announce to the world that you no longer need stellar GPA/test scores/academic achievements to get into MIT. Then a bunch of people come in and say, “mit no longer takes the best students” and you get all offended. The fact that the person who spearheaded the movement to select less for objective criteria fabricated all of her academic degrees makes it even worse. </p>
<p>What did you expect? </p>
<p>Look…if Mollie, LauraN, and others want to avoid criticism they should mention what they had which gained them admittance despite test scores and class rank which were not quite stellar. Mollie, for instance, had taken class(es) at Northwestern as part of the CTD program (the CTY of the midwest). Doing well in those classes does show passion for science and its something you would expect a future mit student to do–going out of their way to learn in their free time. Instead, all she talks about are her 690 math SAT and being involved in church, choir, and cheerleading. Almost none of the critics on the MIT forum are against holistic admissions as long as it is done in a way which makes sense.</p>
<p>haha to jack and orangetwee.</p>
<p>i was seriously consdiering Brown too. the whole “choose your own classes” thing is complete BS. anyone who has a fundamental understanding of human nature fundamentally knows that this is a fundamentally idiotic idea. fundamentally speaking, humans must be prodded and beaten into doing any work.</p>
<p>well, i’ll explain it better. when i sat through the info session, that old guy who is the admissions director said “you know, in high school, you have a kid sleeping to your left, another playing games on his calculator behind you”</p>
<p>he is making the assumption that it is the teacher or school’s fault for not challenging the students enough. in this mode of thinking, the boy sleeping would not be sleeping if he were able to be in a class of his own choosing. </p>
<p>yeah…that’s really stupid.</p>
<p>one more time…fundamental. </p>
<p>P.S. Brown is an amazing school. Just b/c it doesn’t have a core doesn’t mean you should all harp on it. Students that attend there are just as good as those at Chicago and, in the end, it’s quite a bit harder to be accepted to Brown. I’m sure those kids are capable of choosing classes without somebody holding their hand and telling them what to take. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>it’s quite a bit harder because not all of us have famous parents. <em>shrugs</em></p>
<p>:/</p>
<p>Or it could be because</p>
<p>A) Brown gets twice as many applicants.
B) Brown has nearly twice the yield.</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>Collegealum-</p>
<p>please do not follow me around the site just to tell me (and 2 other people who are not even reading this thread) how to think and feel.</p>
<p>That’s all.</p>
<p>Brown IS an amazing college; It was actually my top choice throughout the admissions process. After being admitted to Brown, I thought that was definitely the place for me and was completely gaga over the “open” curriculum, which I think is great if you’re quite clear about what you would like to study and are generally willing to explore new fields.
Then, I decided to further research UChicago before discarding it as an option (which I really wanted to do - discard all of my non-Brown options), but as I found out more and more about UChicago I realized that discarding it would be an impossibility.
( <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=321202[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=321202</a> )</p>
<p>To be fair though, in the end one of my main reasons for going with UChicago was the Core.</p>
<p>I think badman is on the mark. I completely disagree with aspiring; no one needs to beat me with a stick for me to challenge myself intellectually; I want it because it interests me, despite the discipline it requires.I didn’t apply to Chicago because I need a boot camp to learn; rather, I simply don’t know what I want to concentrate on or study, and the Core would give me an exposure that would help me make such a choice. Like Badman said, if you are focused on a certain field or academic track, then Brown would be appropriate- you can do what you want and have no obstacles. Similarly it would be great, then, to get an education at Oxford or Cambridge, where students study only the courses that relate to their field. I think that Brown’s curricular freedom makes sense, and I couldn’t imagine anyone I know there abusing it.</p>
<p>This is really more of a Hobbes or Machiavellian argument… if you want to be able to debate these kinds of concepts further, such as what is the “natural state” of a human or whether humans perform best left to their own devices or “boot camped,” take Classics of Social and Political Thought for your sosc core. I didn’t (I took Self), so I’m kind of spewing here, so I think you get the idea.</p>
<p>I have to say that my attitude towards work in particular and grades especially is more like Brown’s-- I’m very, very bad at making myself motivated to do something I don’t want to do (the idea that I might get a better grade if I work hard on it doesn’t do it for me), yet I find myself spending hours re-reading The Iliad or whatnot and editing my essays for fun.</p>
<p>If I were at Brown, certainly I’d have the freedom to take classes pass/fail and sort of “discover myself,” but I thought that a school of students who are off “discovering themselves” doesn’t lead to much intellectual cohesion. You like molecular biology and don’t know anything about Anna Karenina. I like Proust and don’t care about evolution.* At Chicago, I thought, I’d be able to harp upon a community of people who were reading the same texts as me and thinking the same things that I was, and that’s what I’ve found. So maybe I ended up choosing Chicago for “Brown” reasons.</p>
<p>*for the record, in high school I doubled as a math nerd and an English geek, who liked a little bit of physics and American history to keep things spicy. My math/science self often overpowered my English, actually, just because all my friends were math/science oriented. Once I got to college, though, I shed the math layers to be a true humanities maven.</p>
<p>uh…i actually came here to get away from the mit boards. If you have noticed, I no longer post over on the mit boards. Lo and behold I find people insulting mit people over here.</p>
<p>um…
?</p>
<p>my post was in response to post #32.</p>
<p>collegealum314 and pebbles - truce, please, at least here. I think that those schools that are the most beloved generate the most passionate posts. There is a wonderful quote on one of the Harper library walls - maybe one of the current students will help me out with the exact wording. It’s something to the effect that you should read, not to prove or disprove, but to think and consider.</p>