Brown University - Great College Advice https://greatcollegeadvice.com College Admission Counseling Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:29:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://greatcollegeadvice.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/758df36141c47d1f8f375b9cc39a9095.png Brown University - Great College Advice https://greatcollegeadvice.com 32 32 How Sofia Got Into Brown University https://greatcollegeadvice.com/blog/student-gets-into-first-choice-ivy-league-school-with-help-of-educational-consultant/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 14:05:37 +0000 https://greatcollegeadvice.com/?p=15908 Despite her anxieties about an imperfect GPA, Sofia got into her first-choice college with help from educational consultant Mark Montgomery.

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]]> Sofia thought a blemish on her GPA in freshman year of high school would ruin her chance of getting into the Ivy League. Working with educational consultant Mark Montgomery helped expand her horizons and guide her toward success. In the end she wound up at her first-choice Ivy League school, Brown University.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Sofia La Porta. I’m a high school senior and I live in Hanover, New Hampshire. I’ve been working with Mark since the summer after my freshman year. I think I thought the college process was going to be about me following directions. Getting 2400 on my SAT and getting straight As. And I quickly learned that that wasn’t going to be the way it was going to go, possibly.

Because I got a B+ in the first semester of my freshman year and realized the 4.0 out of reach at that point. And I sort of started to tell myself that I wasn’t capable. And I think that I thought that admissions officers would be able to see right through that. And that they’d see my blemished GPA and say, “Oh, she’s not worthy.”

Why Brown University

I’m not really sure how my fascination with Brown University started out. I think that someone I knew had gone there and talked really highly of it. It was the only college I really knew about so I was like, “That’s the one. That’s it. I’m going there. Gotta go there.” So I went on Naviance and was like this is the GPA I have to have. And this is the SAT I have to have, and I strove for that.

And so three years later I applied for early decision. I got deferred, and it was heartbreaking. But not in the way that I had expected because I think that when I was applying. It was the only school that I could think about. But as I started to write supplements for other schools I started to fall in love with all these other options that I could have.

And in a way I started to feel like, was it too soon to commit to something that maybe just my heart was into. But I wasn’t so sure that my mind was really following my heart. And then I ended finding out that I did get into Brown, where I will be attending in the fall.

Mark’s Help

I think, as I’ve talked about, Mark was really helpful in terms of figuring out ways that I could channel my interests. And even if he didn’t know the exact person that I could work with he was really great at giving advice about how I could get from uninterested, ninth-grade Sofia to this person who cared about things, and who cared about making the world a better place, and that was hugely important.

Also, I think that knowing that someone was looking over all of my documents and everything that I was writing, my college essay, my supplements, looking at what I was doing to prepare for standardized tests was hugely stress-relieving, not only for me but also for my parents, who didn’t go to college in the United States so it was a pretty new process for them.

And I think knowing that someone knew what was going on and knew how to take certain signals and was able to really proofread my essays to deleting two words or adding one, or how I was going to take away a sentence and make sure that that information, that sentence, was still replicated throughout the rest of the essay, was invaluable to my college process.

 

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]]> Summer Programs: Choose Carefully https://greatcollegeadvice.com/blog/summer-programs-and-academic-enrichment-choose-carefully/ Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:47:18 +0000 https://greatcollegeadvice.com/?p=7415 Summer academic programs are very popular in the US. They can be great fun, and even enriching, but don't expect that they'll help you get into the college of your...

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]]> I recently visited Brown University on opening day of the Summer at Brown program.  I took the opportunity to record my thoughts about these sorts of programs.

If you prefer, you can read the transcript below.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
*****************
So I’m here today on the campus of Brown University, one of the eight Ivy League campuses, and it’s a beautiful summer day.  Today is check-in for the Summer at Brown, and this is a program that’s for high school students—it last several weeks—and there are just scads of students that are checking-in to spend most of their summer on a college campus.
A lot of my clients ask me whether or not these programs are really a good thing to do during the summer and on the one hand, they can be a good thing because it is a good way to transition, or to think about, living on a college campus.  Students generally take a course or two—a morning course, an afternoon course—and they get a taste of campus life.
But one of the things I warn against is thinking that taking the Brown Summer Program is actually going to be a way to help increase your chances of getting into Brown.  It really isn’t.  These are completely separate programs that are run, not by the Admissions Office, but by a separate entity within the University.  They’re to make money, they’re to provide opportunity for students, but they really have no relationship with the Admissions Office.
So an alternative might be to think more about what it is you want to accomplish during the summer.  Are there certain things you really want to study?  If there are—like maybe it’s computer science or gaming, maybe it’s music, maybe it’s something like economics—look for the courses, look for the programs that offer those academic subjects that you really have an interest in exploring and find a college campus program that will allow you to do that, or a camp experience, or find ways that you can deepen that interest on your own.
You don’t necessarily have to come to a college campus to do that.  It can be very expensive.  Again, it can be a good experience.  There’s nothing wrong with doing these kinds of summer experiences on campuses around the country, but first of all, make sure you’re doing one that you really think will meet your needs and your interests and second of all, don’t think it’s going to be an easy way into that particular college.  It’s probably not going to be.

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