When you Google search “how to get into an Ivy League,” nearly every guide will mention the application “narrative” — the overarching theme applicants are encouraged to construct when writing their essays. Admissions consultant group Crimson Education writes on their website, “Every Ivy admit represents years of deliberate academic, extracurricular, and personal choices that align into a coherent story.” To have a successful application, a 17-year-old student can no longer only have perfect test scores and a 4.0; they must shape their experiences and interests into a marketable story for admissions committees.
The practice of preparing a narrative, promoted by college counselors and social media influencers, encourages young students to project a premature certainty about their academic and personal identities — one that contradicts the very ethos of an exploratory Brown education. First-years, I implore you to forget all about the profile you sold to the admissions office last year. Let yourself come into Brown as a blank slate.
The “narrative” phenomenon may not be the intention of the admissions committee, but we are tangled up in the system of holistic admissions from which these expectations stem. David Brooks writes about the larger implications of the process in an Atlantic piece titled “How the Ivy League Broke America,” including how the black box of admissions favors affluent students. On an individual level, Brooks also points out that the system’s preference for “spiky” applicants — those who demonstrate some sort of unique identity — diminishes the authentic curiosity of students who make life decisions with the end goal of a college acceptance.
TikTok and Instagram influencers made this preference apparent to me as I, a wide-eyed high school senior, prepared my Brown application. I disregarded any of my interests that didn’t align with the image that I pitched: a wannabe urban researcher inspired by the political dynamics of young adult dystopian fiction. In the uncertainty of my first shopping period, I deferred to those interests I projected in my application. And without realizing it, I began to embody the character that I created in my Common Application. It took two years to realize that I missed out on the prime chance I had to expand my academic horizons.
At Brown, this can be especially damaging. The intention of the Open Curriculum is to empower curious students to “explore courses in any and every discipline.” But for students who have curated their academic interests into a narrow niche, the Open Curriculum can also enable an academic silo. Without general education requirements, students may remain in this silo for their entire Brown career. Even without the pressure to immediately choose a concentration, many first-years enter with a structured academic plan to optimize their Brown experience. In the class of 2030’s First-Year Poll, only 5.5% of respondents were undecided in their intended concentration. In fact, 41% were so certain about their academic future that they already had intentions to double concentrate, further narrowing their options to explore outside of their primary field of study.
To an extent, Brown has tried to discourage the optimization mindset. Last year, the College eliminated the option to triple concentrate. Administrators have expressed that many undergraduates are pursuing double concentrations to build career-oriented credentials at the expense of their exploratory opportunities.
In the University’s own words, “students are responsible for their own intellectual and creative development.” For the first-year student, that means overcoming the self-certainty that you developed in the application process. You’ll never again experience the freedom of your first semester at Brown: You are far off from scary decisions like choosing a concentration, entering recruiting cycles for junior summer or applying to graduate school.The truth is, you can make all of the wrong choices this shopping period and be completely fine.
Here’s an example: Bruno enters his first semester really wanting to explore the humanities. He takes classes in four departments: English, History of Art and Architecture, Philosophy and Hispanic Studies. He loves his philosophy class, so much so that he takes three more the next semester. But come summer, Bruno has a career crisis, and he realizes that he would rather pick a concentration with a structured recruiting pipeline to high starting salaries. Here’s the good news: Even after a year of taking assorted, unrelated courses, he’s barely behind. He has plenty of time to pursue an economics concentration (even applied math-economics) from scratch, study for technical interviews and apply for investment banking internships.
Maybe your story will be completely different from Bruno’s, but my point is that you have the privilege of academic exploration with very few consequences — use it! The only mistake with assured consequences is the decision to box yourself in before you’ve even stepped foot into a college-level lecture. It is hard to take advantage of this freedom when you’re used to the pressure that builds up throughout high school, but there is no set application to the rest of your life once you complete your undergraduate years. The real task as a first-year is to expose yourself to as many of Brown’s academic offerings as possible. Even if you end up being the person you applied as, you can do so with the confidence that it’s the path you chose above all others.
CJ Lair ’28 can be reached at craig_lair @brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
CJ Lair is an opinions editor at The Brown Daily Herald. He is from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and plans to study Political Science at Brown. This is his second year writing for a publication, and is especially interested in political developments and their impacts on the Brown community.
