Farewell Brown

What I did, some lessons, unsolicited pieces of advice and saying a last goodbye

Two and half months ago, I graduated from Brown. When people hear Brown, they think about Open Curriculum. It was indeed a notable aspect of Brown — thanks to the curriculum, I took classes outside my concentrations (ha, yes, a Brown jargon) like literature, classics, pure math, CS, economics, and art.

It gave me a generous amount of freedom that not many other schools gave to kids out of high school to pick whatever they want to do every semester. Thanks to it, at least I took the freedom seriously to think about what topics I want to learn, which I think will be and has been already helpful in the long run, as even after college, I got to really sit down and tune in myself to see what’s next for me, just like I would choose courses. But I am unsure how one can evaluate whether the choices of studies one made were necessarily correct, but Brown saw and valued serendipity as a property of life.

Though, I cannot say for certain that everyone at Brown took it seriously about what they are going to study. I guess this is a matter of free will and to what extent deliberation matters in your decision. 

But now that I think about it, I think the best thing about Brown was not that you can take a literature class as a computational biology student, which most people think is the greatest benefit of the Open Curriculum, but it is that the curriculum lets you be a human being. Humans grow and evolve, just by randomly picking up a book and gaining a new interest, and by unexplainable circumstances, lots of things change. Now that I think about who I was as a freshman — oh boy, was I different.

I did have some reservations about the curriculum, thinking that it may be better if everyone had to read Great Books, and have some common grounds and dialogue going on among the student body. It would be cool to just bump into anyone and be able to discuss Euripides. But I guess this is a direct antithesis to Brown because the whole point of the school would be to help students to reach at own decisions, exercising their free will. Nobody can impose you to read certain books, because a matter of choosing books has to come from a place of volition according to the curriculum. Or perhaps canon education has a deep tension with a growing cultural emphasis on science, innovation, and specialization. Or maybe they believe that there is no such thing as a bedrock of knowledge that everyone has to know or that is just a myth cultivated by social elites to conform to certain narratives. I guess Brown has implicitly formed the belief of the latter. I am just not sure, as I have gained numerous benefits from the canon and Greco-Roman classical education.

Honestly, these social experiments are hard to test, because it’s not like a software product where you can do A/B testing, ha. Still, the outcome of this social experiment was certainly interesting. Some philosophy friends were intensely focused, taking multiple courses each semester with dreams of academia. There were also peers that were filling up every semester with two strikingly different fields (think, Egyptian studies and biology) or a kid who was exploring every single department available at Brown each semester. Or there were some independent concentrators who just made up a whole new branch of studies (I heard about a metaphysics and marketing concentrator). I am unsure if this curriculum works for everyone, so Brown was special in that sense.

I used the curriculum with the main thesis of whether I could learn timeless things that can have enduring value. The classics were one good example that I stuck to; after all these years, humans remained the same in so many ways, and it granted me arresting insights into the nature of humanity. Also, math seemed to be at the core of all technological and scientific accomplishments and had timeless value. Philosophy was fun, but analytic philosophy was a dominant branch at Brown. I thought I would enjoy this approach very much — in high school, I loved Russell and his essays, and what he was doing seemed magical to me at the time. When I first learned about analytic philosophy in college, So I thought that learning more analytic philosophy will give me a better taste of ultimate Truth. Naming and necessity by Kripke was mind-opening, to say the least. So I changed from the Classics and philosophy.

Then I slowly realized what Paul Graham is talking about as I took more classes in analytic philosophy. So I returned to Classics (halfway through), took more courses in ancient philosophy, and had a blast. I never knew I missed Greek that much. I miss going to Gill’s office hours and Greek reading groups. Because of this positive experience, I shortly thought about studying philosophy at a graduate level and took a graduate class, but I wanted to do things of my own, and it seemed more interesting to create things out of the confines of institutions, so I decided against it. Learning these two subjects was still lots of fun and brought joy to my heart, and most certainly did enhance my abstract reasoning capabilities to the max.

Writing personal essays was something I picked up during college. I wish I did more often, but it was still fun to write something on my mind on my blog without the constraints that most academic classes impose, and it was certainly very exciting to have strangers read my essays! Now that I think back, this experience has become and, I think, will continue to be a great asset in my life, and helped me — that took much deliberation — to decide on my career in writing. As I honed the craft of piecing together an essay, I witnessed my thoughts growing and branching out, much like a tree. I could also try to make it beautiful (which was not a thing in academic philosophy, and what I was not focusing on very much), but I will do more in the coming years as a writer — oh very exciting!

Another thing I did outside of classes was to talk to lots of people on many topics. I love cooking, so I would host friends over for dinners and talk to them at length. The extension of this was a small intimate discussion group called the Sage Forum, and we talked about technology and society. Some of the topics ranged from AI and art, politics and distribution problem, to Mars or space colonization. My co-founder and I tried to make sure that the discussion has people from all backgrounds — and it was very exciting to see many perspectives in one setting.

I wish I took care of myself more. I took myself way too seriously (a terrible habit I had from childhood) and was always in a hurry for something. And that something was never something concrete. The lack of clarity was way too overwhelming to handle, and learning how to handle that uncertainty is pivotal. I am just a few months out of college, and even if I got into meditation and taking care of my health from the spring semester of junior year, I wish I had spent less time berating myself for being inadequate for many made-up reasons. Thankfully, I did get into meditation, and I will be forever grateful for Brown Meditation Community. The spring retreat and weekly sits will be unforgettable, and they will remain in me for the rest of my life. I really could have and should have spent more time on the main green or going to the RISD museum, which was free for all RISD and Brown students. I did enjoy going to Newport on weekends, going on an annual apple-picking trip with friends, and daily walks down the Providence River, which I will miss dearly.

This may sound like a weird brag of some sort, but I spent way too much time reading books. I was too preoccupied with a false notion implicitly imposed by society that I have to be at a certain place by a certain time and time seemed to be running up. I have come to think that optimizing for anything comes with serious caveats, and my life so far has been just realizing that over and over. Even things seemingly innocuous like being knowledgeable or happy can have deleterious side effects when it comes to increasing efficiency to the maximum level, just because of how we are built and structured. I will talk more about this point in a later post.

So if you are still in college, I’d recommend two things. Do a project of your own. It could be trivial as collecting and folding intricate origami from Japan. It could also be grand as building a factory in space, and you can start by making a toy model. This would mean picking up some physics and engineering on the way and making anything kind of forces you to build skills along the way, which is way more playful and effective than trying to learn a skill step by step. Try to leave a record somewhere, preferably on the internet, and you’ll increase the surface space for luck. It’s also a lot of fun and being outside the arbitrary rules set by some academic institution is quite exciting. I can never submit any of the essays I write here for my college homework, lol. Also, last but definitely not least, and more importantly, be kind to yourself. Your body will find some balance for you. This naturally translates into being kind to others, and I sadly realized too late in my college career that that’s what life is all about after all.