Brown is the innovative Ivy — that is, the most innovative member of the vaunted Ivy League. The Open Curriculum is actually an open curriculum, which is worth underlining because most self-described open curriculums are just sorta, kinda open. At Brown, it’s really anything goes as long as you are pointed in a clear direction, are collaborative, community-oriented, and also totally brilliant. The campus is home to 6,500 of this type of student, alongside 1,429 faculty. Students have nearly 2,500 courses to choose from, and more than 80 programs (or what other schools tend to call majors).
Undergraduates at Brown aren’t observers. They are active players in the making of change, difference, and innovation. And Providence, Rhode Island is at the core of the Brown experience. It’s a fast-moving urban small city that is deeply scrappy, insanely artistic, and one of the few places left in the country where manufacturing and art and culture are all happening in the same place, resulting in massive amounts of innovation and creation.
Getting into Brown is hard. They received over 51,000 applications for the Class of 2027 and admitted only 2,686 students — or 5%. For the Class of 2028, this number held steady with a 5.2% acceptance rate. If that doesn’t scare you off (which it shouldn’t), in this post we’ll share what we’ve assessed to be the five best programs at Brown.
If low acceptance rates are exciting to you, email us. We’re experts at helping top students get into schools with tiny rates of admission.
What do we mean by best program?
First, a quick terminology reminder. Brown uses the term “program” or “concentration” where other universities use the term “major.” It’s mostly a semantical difference, but it does nod to the open curriculum and the flexibility within the programs at Brown themselves. With that clarified, let’s go into what makes a program at Brown one of the best.
When we’re assessing Brown programs, what we’re looking for falls into five main categories. First, we look for resources. This could include the range and number of courses available, or opportunities for independent study or funding. Next, we look for a combination of focus and breadth. The program should be really clear about what it is without distraction, but also have a range of opportunities for exploration. Finally, we look at the research and internship opportunities. Brown hosts nearly $250 million in sponsored research spending annually, and they build “strategic research collaborations aimed at sparking innovations” at real companies in the real world. We pick majors that are in the midst of this, whether through STEM, the arts, or the humanities.
And, with all of that in mind, these are our top five programs at Brown.
Behavioral Decision Sciences, A.B.
Students in the Behavioral Decision Sciences program study how and why we do the things we do, exploring rationality, judgement, optimization, and more. You’d take courses in “psychology, cognitive science, economics, philosophy, computer sciences, and neuroscience.” And what we love about this program is how Brown it is. It’s science and humanities mashed into a program that is multi-disciplinary but also intensely focused. Students in the program learn the soft skills to understand decision-making and the hard, quantitative skills that translate those soft skills into data that can be analyzed. The program is small, but growing, and its smallness doesn’t scare us because it is pulling resources from so many different places. We also love that the students who thrive most in this program are those who go into it with a clear question around decision making that they want to seek answers to.
Design Engineering, Sc.B.
The Design Engineering program at Brown was created as an engineering program that isn’t about building bridges or measuring the strength of a wall, but rather about using engineering thought processes and tools to design solutions in our complex world. Brown is clear that this program is singular, so while other colleges may have programs with similar names — they aren’t like this. We like this description they provide, “Whereas teaching in traditional Engineering Design begins with a statement of a problem to be solved, Design Engineering requires the student to discover the problem.” It’s not just about the how or the what, but the why and the why not when it comes to designing, making, and bringing things into existence. Students go on to work in tech, innovation, entrepreneurship, industry, policy, and more. And those in the program often layer it with subjects like computer science or visual art — which illustrate two very different approaches to the program, but equally strong ones.
Modern Culture and Media, A.B.
This program, or concentration, meshes media and broader cultural movements, conversations, and formations all together into one beautiful mix. It’s all about “creative thinking and critical production,” which is to say comparative analysis and the ability to look at complex things around us and make sense of them. The program breaks down departmental walls and mashes it all together — after all, that’s how we deal with it in real life! Students choose an area, or areas, of focus for their study and writing, analyzing a particular type of media or maybe a cultural, theoretical, or social formation. An example they give for the latter is “the changing form of the novel,” or “video games and theories of representation.” Students who graduate from the program can go on to careers in the media and journalism (either making it, critiquing it, or both), in entertainment, or in academia.
Science, Technology, and Society, A.B.
Like many of our favorite programs at Brown, this one is also an interdisciplinary program. It’s ideal for students with a science mind, but who are also deeply curious about context, culture, and the ramifications of the amazing things that are reshaping our world on a daily basis. The concentration also challenges students to redefine what they consider science as they are empowered to create a thematic track that brings together things like philosophy, history, medicine, and more. One of the things we love most about this particular program is that students produce a set of original research papers through mentorship with talented faculty and the support of subject-area experts. This exposure to research is great, of course, if you want to do more research in the future, but it’s actually an amazing opportunity to differentiate yourself in the job market after graduation whatever field you go into. And, like many of our favorite programs at Brown, it’s small. This isn’t an assembly line. It’s intimate, close, and you’ll always have an impressive mentor within reach.
Contemplative Studies, A.B.
What is Contemplative Studies? It’s not neuroscience, but kinda. It’s not psychology, but sorta. “Contemplative Studies investigates the underlying philosophical, psychological, and scientific bases of human contemplative experience.” Or, more precisely, how our brains work in a relation to the things that make us human, from religion to art, music to literature. It’s all about gaining understanding of the human contemplative experience, but a term like “contemplative experience” is honestly such a Brown term. It’s hard and soft at the same time, just like how Brown approaches just about everything. The courses are so tempting, with names like “Divine Drugs: Psychedelics, Religion, and Spirituality,” “Meditation, Mindfulness and Health,” and “The Sound of One Hand: Zen in Asia and the West.” Yet again, the program is small, but we truly believe it to be mighty because it’s so deeply self-selecting. You need to be someone who thinks differently to even dare to dive into it. Graduates go into medicine, education, research, and graduate study in everything from neuroscience to Tibetan Buddhist Studies.
These are our top five programs at Brown because there are absolutely amazing, but we hope you’ll also use them as jumping off points for discovering your own Brown perfect fit. Explore the offerings at Brown through their filtering tool to find programs based on life and career goals, or by your passions and interests. We love how this helps students to find majors that are their perfect fit, but that they may have never thought of for themselves.
If you’re totally into Brown but aren’t sure how to turn that enthusiasm into an acceptance, we can help.