It so often seems that complaining about Brown's lack of Ivy League luxuries, like supposedly sub-par facilities and, gasp, an endowment only in the hundreds of millions, is beyond recourse. We aren't Harvard or Yale, and we couldn't care less, really. Brown is Brown: We are the college whose students used to venture off into Rhode Island and Massachusetts's forests, capture baby bears and bring them back to campus for photo ops. We spout off Foucault theory to our sexual partners, and - rather successfully - reform the school library into a scene. We are all wildly attractive but refuse to date each other, and perversely peruse Us Weekly like it was the first copy of a Chuck Palahniuk novel.
When our time is up at Brown and we can barely recognize our outdated facebook photos, it becomes startlingly clear that besides our expensive education, what we really procure from school is a lifestyle aesthetic. To be socially awkward, neurotic and chock full of academic rhetoric and to make it seem sexy, accepted and, dare I say, admirable takes a lot of work. Even more, it takes the right environment to continue the lifestyle that we have become accustomed to. A real 9-to-5 will kill that instantaneously, and we all have to leave Providence eventually. So where are we headed?
To finishing school or, rather, New York City. After years in a city like Providence, whose marketed cultural center revolves around the mall, Brown graduates descend to the restless island of Manhattan, though any borough will do - Brooklyn is also recommended as a cushion to break a Brown student's fall into the real world.
New York is kind of the annex campus to Brown, if you will. Here you take classes in "Neighborhood Deconstruction" or "Social Graces," which mostly includes figuring out which streets and people to avoid. More, you learn how to rationalize assumptions of you as a Brown kid. For instance, the other day I was having a conversation with a drunken Columbia student in Brooklyn, where I'm staying for the summer. The astute (and intoxicated) Columbia man insisted on playing the ever-so clever game of guessing my major. He began with the suggestion of, "Drumming?" to which I answered a very aggravated and defensive "No." He then went on to ask, "How about International Studies?" Through a clinched jaw and glaring eyes, I looked at this hapless fellow, with his frothy Coors Light beer can and stained button-down, and I began to feel sorry for him. This was an individual ravaged by "distribution requirements" and horrible taste in beer, and so I smiled and replied, "Gender Studies." As soon as the words left my mouth, the kid pounded his fist on the table, let out a raucous guffaw, and screamed, "That was my next guess!" I promptly excused myself to watch Comedy Central upstairs.
Although I was prepared to audit more classes in the ongoing "course book" New York had to offer on social avoidances, I wasn't quite prepared for an objective opinion about my "cumulative work," per se. Perhaps my Columbia inquistor was a bit right - for three years I have rationalized the irrational and impractical, like developing thesis topics that have absolutely no relevance to an outside world that has subsequently stopped reading. But I also knew then that Brown's finishing school was going to be an essential post-commencement stay.
Brown's finishing school doesn't exactly promise a plethora of career choices upon graduation, but instead a much more profitable network of connections. The myth that Brown kids just don't care about anything is misleading. We care plenty, just mostly about our own agendas, which are in turn mostly only understood by other Brown kids. And, thus, a network is born. We learn to take care of each other, from letting a friend crash on one's couch for months to forming start-up juice companies together.
Now, admittedly, outsiders might find our system obnoxiously insular and arrogant - saying things like "procuring a lifestyle aesthetic" is a far too snobby statement for some - but nine out of ten times you can bet those kids are still embittered from their Brown rejection letter. Let's face it: They're dying to be your friend.
Marjon Carlos '05 can't wait for the post-NYC move to Greenwich, Conn.
