This week, I officially matriculated as a PhD student at Brown University.
For the past 6 years I've flirted with the idea of pursuing a PhD -- applied to a several schools back during my senior year of college in 2006. Brown was actually one of those schools. They rejected me. As a shot in the dark, I casually sent them an informal email simply asking if I could be considered for their Master's program. This was very unorthodoxed, as the Master's and PhD programs have separate applications and are examined differently by the admissions committee. To my surprise, they replied 3 days later with the following opening line:
Dear Christopher,
Congratulations! On behalf of the Department of Computer Science, I'mdelighted to inform you that your application for admission to the Sc.M.program has been approved by this department.
However, I ended up enrolling at UCLA for my Master's. The future communication I had with Brown would all prove to be equally impressive, genuine, and caring.
In short:
- my undergrad, Florida Tech, was a great school for me, as it served as the perfect stepping stone and challenged me appropriately as I developed foundations in Math and Computer Science.
- UCLA was great and very different from Florida Tech in every way: 40,000 students instead of 4,000. More Olympic medals and NCAA championships than any other university. Tons of crazy overachieving high schoolers who are all very diverse in their interests and talents.
- Brown seems to be the best of all worlds, as I briefly explain below.
Brown has the incredibly smart student body, world-class researchers, and over-achieving everybody. However, the university is small (6,000 ugrads and 2,000 grads) and is within the quaint town of Providence, Rhode Island, which is like the smaller, like-able little brother of Boston. Moreover, I've never witnessed such genuinely caring professors, staff, and students. It really is like a tight-knit community, and in short, they do education right here.
Brown is consistently ranked as the #1 college in terms of happy students, and I can now see why.
There's an open-curriculum, where undergrads get to draft their own program. No other major university in America has this [1]. Classes can be pass/fail if they want. And surprisingly, the professors -- at least the ones I've had thus far -- are all excellent teachers, which is naturally rare amongst research universities. Moreover, it is appears common for strangers to first ask you, "How do you like it here so far?" to which both parties then say, "I love it." It's eerie how often this seems to happen.
I could ramble for a while about little situations that have risen thus far, and how it's been really cool and impressive. However, I'll just conclude with two very small events that I encountered during my 3 days. These events were tiny, but yielded a surprising "oh wow" response:
- In my first Computational Biology class, the very energetic professor was giving motivation for studying the field and provided a very quick intro to biology. In passing, and just an incidental part of one sentence, he stated, "by the way, just a few years ago, someone won the Nobel Prize in this area... oh yea, and he was a Brown undergrad here"
- While walking across campus, I stumbled upon a building that had tons of students who were packed in (and even hanging around outside), as everyone watched some intense dancing. I caught the latter half of some dramatic African dancing which included Bongo drums! What a diverse and cool student body.
So, in short, my first week has been great. I love Brown.
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