Adrianne is a Senior Admissions Counselor and TV/film director, producer, writer, and actress currently based in LA. She uses her experience in multiple disciplines to help students achieve their personal and academic goals.
Welcome to the Brown University supplement for the 2025-2026 application cycle! You’ve got three longer essays that cover pretty typical subject matter (i.e., the Why School essay, with an academic focus)
Table of Contents
Long Essays (200-250 words)
This question is about the overlap between your academic interests and Brown’s unique curriculum. First order of business: Do you know what the Open Curriculum is? Of course you do, because you’ve done your research thoroughly, and the Open Curriculum is a big part of why you’re applying to Brown. Right?
Just in case, you can check out the Brown admissions website, or read my Sparknotes version:
Brown has no distribution requirements. Many colleges require that you earn a set number of credits in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. They also generally want you to use a calculator once or twice, and know how to ask where the library is in at least one foreign language by the time you graduate. At Brown, however, you can pretty much take whatever tickles your fancy. Basically, you just need to take a certain number of courses, have a “concentration program” (what Brown calls a major), and be able to write well by the end of your four years.
As always, you’re going to want to discuss: the concentration you’d like to pursue, a few upper-level, Brown-specific classes you’re looking forward to taking, a couple of professors you’d like to work with.
All the while, you need to demonstrate how these interests and desires are grounded in the work you’ve already done. When you “declare” your concentration in this essay, don’t worry —you’re not committing yourself to anything. You can change it up once you get to campus (or anytime during your first two years, actually). Your concentration is just for the sake of this essay. Choose what fits best with what you’ve done in the past. If you’ve really shone in your STEM classes, now is probably not the time to say that you want to do Classics (especially if you’ve never taken Ancient Greek or Latin, obviously). Your response will be strongest if you can demonstrate focus, direction and continuity. You want to make sure that you are presenting a clear narrative or story that will be compelling to admissions officers.
Upper-level, Brown-specific classes means you should not say you’re looking forward to taking Intermediate Spanish II, since every college offers that. You could probably take it for a lot less money at your local community college. Instead, go with something like “The Sedimentary Rock Cycle of Mars and Earth,” if that’s consistent with your academic profile. The professors you mention should probably be tenured faculty members (or at least folks you know will be there for a few years), and teach subjects in line with your interests.
As always, you need to be demonstrating that you’ve done your research. Make sure you know who’s teaching at Brown, what great classes they offer, and what your concentration will be.
At Brown, you will learn as much from your peers outside the classroom as in academic spaces. How will you contribute to the Brown community? (250 words)
“Why Brown: Part II.” This is all about your extracurriculars. So, as always, you need to do some solid research about what kinds of student organizations and clubs are available at Brown. Again, this needs to be consistent with what you’ve already done. Your past achievements are the foundation on which you will build the promises you make about your future endeavors. Don’t fall into the trap of using platitudes, or making yourself look like a hero when you talk about how you will contribute to the Brown community (don’t say: “I will be an honest, diligent, and conscientious community member who will found a club to save the whales”). There’s no use in bragging about what you will do in the hypothetical scenario where you are a student at Brown. Write, in a matter-of-fact way, about how you will bring the abilities you’ve already demonstrated, and the experiences you’ve already had, to Brown.
Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community.
Lots of colleges ask questions like this. They’re good questions. This is a great chance for you to show admissions officers something unique about yourself that they may not already know. Your response should ultimately be more about you than the “place or community you call home.” The idea is to show how that place or community has helped make you who you are.
I’ve had students tell me: “But nothing is interesting about where I’m from!” I promise you that’s not the case. Part of what this question helps your reader measure is whether you have enough self-awareness to look at your life from the outside, whether you can be introspective and explore the particularities (and maybe even the peculiarities) of who you are.
So begin by remembering that “places” and “communities” can mean whatever you want. The place you write about could be your public library (assuming you have a great, unique story to tell about it). Your community could be an online community of programmers, or the strangers you ride the bus with every morning on your way to school. Again, you need to have a convincing and compelling story to tell—one that highlights something truly unique about you. (I know: easier said than done.) I’m simply saying that there are no right or wrong topics here.
This being said, you’re going to have a hard time writing about working in a soup kitchen or playing on the field hockey team, since these choices are highly common, and the whole point is to stand out from the pack. Keep in mind that writing about community service means running the risk of painting yourself as a savior, when the reality is that literally everyone you’re competing with for a spot at Brown does community service. Writing about sports seems inevitably to lead to predictable platitudes about teamwork, diligence, reliability, and leadership. Don’t get me wrong: these are great qualities to have, but you don’t want to be the 6,890,432,855th applicant to use sports as a metaphor for life.
Brown students care deeply about their work and the world around them. Students find contentment, satisfaction, and meaning in daily interactions and major discoveries. Whether big or small, mundane or spectacular, tell us about something that brings you joy.
This question is likely intentionally open-ended to allow students to think as big or as small as they’d like, as they emphasize in the last part of this question. Maybe you’re thrilled by doing large-scale climate science research, or you just love the hummingbirds that land outside of your kitchen window. Be honest about what brings you joy — it’s probably not your favorite thing to study for your math test (although, if it really is, you do you!), so there’s no need to pick something you think your admissions officer will think is impressive. In fact, it will be very obvious to them that that’s what you’re attempting to do and will quickly read as disingenuous.
It’s also important that you don’t repeat yourself on your application. Don’t elaborate on the same extracurricular activities you’ve talked about elsewhere in your application unless you can offer a new perspective, specifically one aspect of it that brings you joy. But it’s probably the best option to talk about something more personal or creative. Do you like watching painting tutorials or experimenting with ganache recipes? Are you an avid collector of Pokémon cards or niche accessories? Tell that story in the most creative way possible!
Short Answers
What three words best describe you? (3 words)
Sometimes the shortest questions can be more difficult than the much longer essays… and this is no exception. It’s not an easy feat to encapsulate yourself in just three words, but Brown is, in fact, asking you to do that. So, the important things to remember are specificity and authenticity — don’t be vague, and don’t get unnecessarily complicated. Stay away from broad adjectives, “determined” or “hard-working,” which probably describe most students applying to Brown; it’s just not going to be memorable.
But also, stay away from words that make it look like you just cracked open the thesaurus (it’s hard to believe a 17-year-old would naturally describe themselves as “punctilious,” for instance). Strike a balance. One approach would be that one word covers personality, one describes you as a student, and one describes you in your extracurriculars. Regardless of the approach you choose, it needs to feel authentic to your voice and consistent to the
If you could teach a class on any one thing, whether academic or otherwise, what would it be? (100 words)
Have fun with this one! Need some inspo? Look for actual college classes that cover niche and interesting topics — some at Brown include: “Walden + Woodstock: The American Lives of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bob Dylan,” “Funny/Not Funny: Taking Comedy Seriously,” and “So You Want to Change the World?”
Brown takes great pride in its Open Curriculum, allowing students to choose their own path without strict requirements, so it’s only natural that they’d ask potential students to think as big as they can when it comes to possible classes. They’re not kidding when they say “academic or otherwise” — they actually want you to choose a cool and exciting class title that actually relates to some of your interests and also suggests a more complex and interesting approach to the topic, much like many of their existing classes do.
In one sentence, Why Brown? (50 words)
You may think that you already answered this question, and you’d be sort of right. But you discussed the Open Curriculum, not Brown as a whole. And now you’ve got to do the latter in just 50 words — no pressure!
You’re not going to be able to cram all of your extensive research into this short word count, so it’s important to be as efficient as possible. That usually requires a bit of a creative approach. Maybe you describe what a day in your life as a Brown student looks like, or you point out how you resonate with the mission statement. You want to find the common ground between your student brand and what Brown offers. How are you going to make the most of what Brown will offer you? How will Brown help you achieve your goals?
As always, college consultants are here to help. Don’t hesitate to reach out.
