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Brown: Academic Interests (Open Curriculum)

200-250 words

Brown's Open Curriculum allows students to explore broadly while also diving deeply into their academic pursuits. Tell us about any academic interests that excite you, and how you might pursue them at Brown.
What it’s really asking

What do you genuinely want to study, and why does Brown's no-requirements structure specifically help you study it? They want intellectual range plus a concrete plan, not a list of departments. This is Brown's version of the 'Why us' essay, so naming real Brown specifics matters.

Why they ask it

The Open Curriculum only works for students who can direct themselves. Brown uses this essay to find people who will actually use that freedom well rather than drift or panic without requirements.

Three ways in
Cross two fields

Pair two interests that don't obviously go together and show what taking both, with nothing forcing them apart, would let you create.

Chase a question

Start from a question you can't stop chasing, then show which Brown courses or concentration structures let you chase it across departments.

Outgrow one subject

Tell a small story of a moment your curiosity outran one subject, and explain how Brown's freedom is the obvious next room for it.

✕  Weak opening

“I have always been passionate about learning, and Brown's Open Curriculum is the perfect place for a curious student like me to explore my many interests.”

✓  Strong opening

“I want to know why a crowd of 30,000 people moves like one nervous animal, which means I need a statistics class and a psychology class to stop pretending they are unrelated.”

✦ Annotated example · Why fungi (and the Open Curriculum). Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Last summer I spent four days watching a log rot, which is a strange way to fall in love with a field. I had set up a phone on a tripod over a fallen oak in my backyard to time-lapse the turkey-tail fungus spreading across it. 1What I expected was decay. What I got was a map: the fungus did not spread randomly but followed the wood's grain like a city following its rivers, and I started wondering whether the same math that describes traffic could describe a colony deciding where to grow.That question is the reason the Open Curriculum frightens and thrills me in equal measure. 2My fungus question is not a biology question or a math question; it is stranded somewhere between them. At Brown I would chase it across departments, pairing a course in mycology with one in network theory, and using the senior-year independent concentration option to build something like 'biological systems and computation' if no existing path quite fits. 3I want to sit in a seminar where I am the only person who has watched a log for four days, and learn from the person next to me who has watched something I would never think to look at. The point of so much freedom, I think, is not to avoid hard requirements but to choose harder ones, the kind nobody assigned because nobody else was asking the question yet.4
  1. 1A small, true, slightly odd scene instead of a thesis statement. Brown rewards specific joy, and a rotting log read with affection is far more memorable than 'I am passionate about biology.'
  2. 2Naming both fear and thrill is honest and grown-up. It signals the student understands freedom is a responsibility, not just a perk, which is the maturity Brown's curriculum demands.
  3. 3Concrete, school-specific mechanisms (mycology plus network theory, the independent concentration) prove the student researched HOW Brown works, not just that it sounds nice. This is intellectual self-direction made literal.
  4. 4The closing reframes freedom as the freedom to take on MORE, not less. That inversion is exactly the self-directed seriousness Brown is selecting for, and it lands the essay on conviction rather than wishfulness.
Stuck? Start here
  • What two subjects do your teachers think of as separate that you secretly think are the same subject?
  • Is there a question you keep researching on your own time that no single class at your school covers?
  • When did a requirement or a syllabus get in the way of something you actually wanted to learn?
Before you submit
  • Have I named at least one real Brown specific (a concentration structure, a course, a program) that could not be swapped for another school?
  • Does this essay show the Open Curriculum doing something for me, not just me admiring it?
  • Is there a concrete plan or project here, not only a list of interests?

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