Do 97 percent of admitted freshmen really know what they want to concentrate in?
Statistics released by the University indicate that only 3 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2014 chose "undecided" as their concentration. But Dean of Admission Jim Miller '73 wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that the number, which is lower than last year's, reflects a wording change on the undergraduate application.
"The decrease this year in the percentage of applicants choosing ‘undecided' is a function of the way we asked the question about intended concentrations, not a change in the way students are thinking about their Brown academic careers," Miller wrote.
Unlike in past years, the application for next year's freshman class asked students to "characterize (their) level of commitment to this field of study" by selecting one of three options.
Incoming students who applied as "decided" expressed a range of certainty in their direction of study, according to Miller.
"We suspect the new language led people who were really undecided to select several potential concentrations and then choose the ‘interested, but open to other possibilities' level of commitment (the lowest on the continuum), which was another way of saying ‘I'm pretty undecided,' " Miller wrote.
Many incoming students said they didn't think applying as "decided" would change their chances of admission.
"As an applicant, it was made very clear to me that whatever concentration I chose at the beginning was by no means permanent, so I think there were probably a lot of applicants just filling in any box that sounded interesting," wrote Will Peterson '14 in a message to The Herald. "I think I knew that it was better to indicate some sort of concentration to give my application some context."
"Even though I'm pretty undecided about what I'm going to study, I didn't apply as undecided," he added. "I'm pretty sure that I said I wanted to go into Media, Publishing and Journalism, or whatever that area was. I might have possibly marked Linguistics."
Marjorie Palmeri '14 wrote in a message to The Herald that she has always been interested in science, so she listed biology as her primary concentration. Though her mind could change in the future, she wrote, "as of now, that is the direction I want to take."
Some admitted students said they felt it was better to put something than to put nothing.
"Even though Defense Against the Dark Arts is a competitive field, I feel that putting it on my application helped, if only a little," wrote admitted student Tim Balcavage in a message to The Herald.
