hey there if you clicked on this video chances are you're probably considering Brown as your University for your undergrad or maybe Masters the good news is I'm a current senior at Brown who's graduating in 2 years and kind of experienced the college both online and on campus for 4 years now and I'm here to give you an inside scoop of some of the pros and cons of Brown University and information that you won't be able to find online so I actually applied during the start of Co so the last year of my high school was actually fully cancelled my high school was in Beijing China we were a IB School so all our exams got canceled as well and everything went remote my first year at Brown was actually fully remote all my classes were online Zoom um I can actually get to see campus until my sophomore year so if you've applied to Brown or got an offer from Brown it's likely you've heard of the open curriculum and we're kind kind of famous for that and I feel like on the website and how it's kind of portrayed um is a little V it just kind of tells you that you know you can take whatever classes you want there's no Core Curriculum and of course to a certain extent that is right so although I'm currently concentrating as we call it or basically my major is in computer science before I actually thought about doing music and economics at BR and I've taken a lot of Economics classes I thought about getting a double con concentration which is like a double major um in econ and um CS but I was able to change that with basically no repercussions and what's great about the open curriculum that is also kind of not super advertised we only have a b and c well I guess and no credit so there aren't any waiting so you wouldn't be able to get an A+ or a minus or B+ or B minus and so on and how that works is actually usually there's actually no curve um and we say that there is a curve but not really in the sense of having a top percentile it's more for setting a lower boundary usually classes are capped at 90% especially for the Cs classes I've been taking so if you get 90% and above you're guaranteed an A and you know if your classmates all get 90% then you know the professor might get a talk from the Department for having bad proportions of grades but you guys all walk away with a no problem so I don't know how much this was actually advertise but there's a special option for taking your classes called snc which is short for satisfactory or no credit so it's basically past fail but what it isn't really kind of known to all is you can technically graduate with all snc classes if you wanted to it might make your job prospects a little harder grad school a little harder but if undergrad is your last stop and you kind of you know what you want to do it's possible I've seen people who've taken Ence for every single class you know I wouldn't suggest this personally but it's possible and that's basically saying if you get a c grade or above then you automatically pass and the funny thing that is definitely not advertised is on Brown on our official transcripts if you fail a class so you no credit it so either you know you get a grade lower than C or if you're in this snc option get the NC credit for any sort of option then guess what it disappears from your transcript yeah so like on your unofficial transcript so the one that brown has internally yeah you'll be able to see it but guess what when you're applying to jobs when you're applying to internships when you're applying to grad school other schools won't be able to see it and that's the same for dropping classes until I believe 2 weeks before the final exam so there's actually a lot of leeway here which is why we have something that is definitely a kind of gr area for brown students and it's our grade inflation I think I saw in a stat somewhere that our average grade was 3.76 which is crazy high and I think we're actually first in all of the universities in America and I guess you decide if this is something that's good for you if having a high GPA and you know getting it at a relatively low cost comparing to I guess other scores then Brown is is a no Brer just for this alone another thing that is not advertised or can't really be shown in kind of the online stats is you actually get professors teaching you in your classes and you have the sense that they actually want to be there teaching you and it might sound kind of weird because you know maybe at your high school all the teachers seem like they really wanted to be there because that was their profession to teach they were like solely an educator professors The Gray Line is kind of hard to set so I've heard from friends at a lot of other schools and I'm not going to name names but some that you think are really prestigious they' have these professors just on the course code they'd come for the introduction and then that's it um and it's because of this complex thing where you know your professors are not only teachers but they're also researchers they might have their own labs and they also got to you know think about their funding and their grants and you know if they want to spend more time on their research and also some universities they actually would want to prioritize the profit of it all you just have graduate Tas or postdocs teaching you and they just keep swapping but at Brown It's that's absolutely not the case there's office hours that all the professors have and when you go there you know you can just have a chat with them you can chat about the course you can chat about your projects for advice you can really talk about anything you want and you feel like they really want to talk talk to you and give you their advice and now we're kind of getting into this gray area of just very strong characteristics of brown and I guess to some people they would be Pros to some people they would be cons and one of the biggest ones is location so Brown is located in Providence Rhode Island and for those of you who might not know where this is it's basically an hour's drive from Boston and I guess 3 hours drive from New York and so this location we're kind of at the shore but it's definitely not like a beach city like LA or Miami right and it's East Coast so it gets cold and it's not like a little town it's still the capital of a state and there are tall buildings I wouldn't say skyscrapers but you know it's pretty modern um to some extent but definitely I wouldn't consider this as a big city and you know my experience of living in Beijing Hong Kong and Vancouver I feel like even compared to Vancouver Providence is just it's at a much smaller scale so everything is very Boutique I would say and that's to say that we also get a very good campus feeling and I believe that especially coming here and experiencing it you get a super good blend of kind of very beautiful scenery right and a very safe campus but it's not so entrenched in nature that you kind of need to drive 7 hours until you get to civilization or stuff like that because there's an Amtrak station um and basically you can get to Boston um in like 40 50 minutes or 1 hour on the MBTA and if you want to go to New York that's also kind of the same case there's trains that just go there for a few dollars if you book early um and it's going to be like 3 and 1/2 hours another thing is with Providence and its size you really get to explore the place and know it really well so not only do you get this really good feeling of a college campus there's also a quite Boutique selection of stores like one of the most famous tart stores bakeries called pesti and they just have some of the best fruit tarts ever and I've tasted a lot of fruit tarts but I think this really has a special place in my heart I guess the next big thing I would put this definitely as a con but I did hear some very minimal kind of Reflections on it as a pro and that's Brown's food so I guess um there's a meal plan system and it gets decreasingly intense as you um kind of spend your time here at Brown so as a freshman you have to buy the most intense meal plan and that's I think it translates around three meal swipes a day so that's like 21 swipes or this's is flex Point sort of mumbo jumbo that is a bit complex um but basically unless you're a person who manages to wake up every day at a super healthy time and you just eat three meals every single day there's absolutely no way that you'll not have a bunch left over and I've only heard of some of my athlete friends actually being able to finish all of them because they have training in the morning and you know foodwise there's a few cafeterias so there's the ratty and I've actually made a video kind of showing the dining experience there um which I personally and I've actually worked in the ready and that's kind of a story for another video but it's clean I mean sometimes it's okay but you know being a very person I guess with relatively High food standards I just don't think that it makes the cut and it's not to say the portions are big cuz it's kind of like you can get your own so if you want your share of unhealthy pizzas and kind of mediocre burgers that you just make yourself with buns and and beef patties then you know you'll be fine and there's another cafeteria called uh vdub and it's her for I think fie woolly but no one really says that and that place is also kind of like you can get your own and they usually have these bowls so when I used to go it used to be like shrimp bowls fishbowls and you can add rice and you know there's all sorts of stuff like that I feel like it tends to war it's kind of like Mexican food and that sort of Cuisine um that's that place is like not bad I wouldn't say it's like super good either but I believe it's slightly better than ready but that comes at the cost of I guess less variety cuz it's much smaller cafeteria and I guess the best of all the cafeteras is Andrews and so Andrews is located at the old Penbrook campus I think Andrews is hands down probably the best overall but they're pre-portion and it's usually pizzas sandwich wies and changing variety of relatively not bad sort of food choices so there's like their sort of Providence version of f they have you know like spaghetti and some Asian Cuisine that is kind of remade like it's not super authentic or anything but it's not bad and then there's also this place called Joe's and that's kind of like a late night Diner um so they have your favorites you know the mozzarella cheese sticks the late night fries and burgers and it's all super oily and it's that kind of junk food that you'd want maybe at night as like I don't know like a comfort food they also have the salad section um and it's not bad um it's a pretty big bowl as well and sometimes there's food trucks outside and you can use your brown sweat so during my freshman year when I lived in a grad Center that was actually right across the street um so I did go there quite a lot and I ended up putting on quite a lot of weight and then for food options the other one is dining out so you have the street and there's quite a lot of restaurants and a bunch are actually opening as of now like I see a lot of like advertisements and you know it's getting better I think Co really hit hard on the economy of the street there were a lot of restaurants that I heard existed previously but are closing down and you know like a few of them are pretty good and I guess I can make a separate video on kind of my ratings of the restaurants and kind of recommendations but I got to give it to Providence there's actually quite a lot of Boutique restaurants um so there's quite a lot of good french food Italian food and you know their standards are pretty high it's not too expensive um it's kind of what you expect for the quality of food that you're getting um so there are those options um yeah and and then I guess another big part of college are the dorms and brown has a very strict on campus policy so freshman is mandatory as most universities sophomores are also mandatory for dorms and then this gets kind of weird juniors are also mandatory technically so by kind of the official regulations you can only move off campus in your senior year but then there's a caveat which is that during your sophomore year as you're Rising into your junior year there's this off-campus Lottery that you can fill up out and basically you get the chance to maybe go off campus and what that means is you know you'll get authorization and you won't have to pay for dorms but recently Brown actually opened up two really really nice dorms so that problem is basically solved so if you're watching this video now the rooming situation has gotten a lot better and the new dorms are really nice I have friends that live there and you know it's just really good and if you get those I guess probably not as a freshman but maybe in your junior year then you're pretty you're going to have a good time I guess another aspect that some of you guys are thinking about is kind of break life and I think that at Brown is definitely a lot kind of more minimal than you find at other universities so there is this place where there's all the frats and sororities but it's just not a huge part of the campus experience I think only about 10 to 20% of the campus body is part of a fraternity or sority so if you're very very kind of into kind of joining a frat and or joining a sorority and that's kind of the college experience you want I think Brown is probably not going to be the best choice that you have you might want to consider your other options but on the other hand there's a lot of students that really don't like this Greek life sort of frat culture so if that's the case for you then Brown's a really good place because you wouldn't really feel any sort of pure pressure to join a frat or kind of like a heavy influence from that sort of culture so I guess to wrap up you know for every school there's pros and cons and you know I had the chance of other universities um to choose from and ultimately I came to Brown and I don't regret it a single day I think it's hands down one of the best undergraduate experiences that you can get I hope that this can act as sort of a guide for those of you guys navigating you know Rd decisions that are coming out or have come out and I guess those of you thinking about uh early decision choices and whether to choose Brown and you know if you guys guys have any questions you can leave them down in the comment section and then I'll try to answer all of them I guess now uh those of you who are choosing to enter your undergrad experiences it's your time and your journey and I hope that this video can give you a little insight on whether you should choose brown or not thanks for watching