Why Brown?
Brown students value the University’s open curriculum and the freedom they have to shape their own academic program.
By crafting your own curriculum with the guidance and assistance of your advisors and teachers, you will be challenged to define liberal education for yourself. You will be encouraged to explore widely across the disciplines. In doing so you will learn the powers and limits of different ways of knowing.
Brown students and faculty are typically innovative, creative, and intellectually restless, never satisfied with the conventional way of doing things, always eager to cross boundaries and to experiment with new approaches to solving problems.
Belonging to such a community is a stimulating experience that will help you learn and grow. Instead of trying to inculcate a single, common tradition of values and beliefs, Brown’s curriculum encourages the exploration of different ways of thinking, judging, and imagining. The goal of such a curriculum is to create cosmopolitan citizens who revel in and are eager to contribute to a world of multiplicity and change.
One of the most important goals of a liberal education at Brown is to develop active learners who take responsibility for their own education. You will have extraordinary independence here and an array of intellectual and creative opportunities. Deans, faculty, and the many groups of peer advisors stand ready to help you make wise choices and find your way. To be an individual, you will find, requires a community, because we all have the power to help and enrich each other.
Brown values diversity — our differences enable us to learn from one another and to open up possibilities for creativity and discovery that would be missing in a homogeneous world.
Brown Medical School and Graduate School attract physicians, researchers, teachers, students, and significant research programs and funding. Brown, the third largest employer in the Providence area, also helps to develop new businesses, and research opportunities, through its partnerships statewide.
Brown welcomes you to a very special city and state. Providence is a “Renaissance” city of arts and cross-culturalism. It is the capital of Rhode Island, which was the first of the thirteen colonies to declare independence. Rhode Island has historically fostered a strong spirit of independence among its citizenry – the majestic State House is topped with a statue of “the Independent Man.” Brown is proud to claim four of the state’s top office-holders as alumni. Governor Donald Carcieri ’65, Attorney General Patrick Lynch ’87, Providence Mayor David Cicilline ’83, and former U.S. Senator Lincoln Chaffee ’75.
Brown works closely with leaders of Providence’s public education system and human service agencies to leverage the resources of the University’s centers and programs in support of our city residents.
Brown actively promotes public service opportunities at colleges across the country, and is a founding member of a consortium of private colleges and hospitals that works on behalf of Providence children.
“What the student wants is a monk’s cell, well lit and heated, with a corner from which they can look at the stars.”
— Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
Life on the Brown campus leads to lifelong friendships. Brown will provide the room — nicer than the monk’s cell Le Corbusier envisioned — the light, and the heat. How you look at the stars is up to you.